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Abstract
It is not infrequent for some patients with advanced disease to express a certain desire to die as a consequence of multidimensional suffering (physical, psychological, emotional, social, spiritual-existential) that can be present at the end of life. What’s more, in this context, some patients may also experience a certain loss of a sense of dignity or identity, understood here as the intrinsic and undeniable quality of human beings. In light of studies that have explored the experience of illness of patients with advanced illness, we can observe that, often, the suffering that they experience, (their anguish and fears), are not the description of their current clinical situation but rather they are related to the anticipation of a future situation (painful, uncertain, unknown) that they will not be able to manage.
The experience of temporality, therefore, is a fundamental aspect of understanding the experience of illness in many patients that live with an extreme awareness of the time limit of their life. In this analysis, some philosophical ideas will be presented – mainly from the perspective of the phenomenology of embodiment – in order to reflect on the issue of anticipating pain. Links will be made between patients’ experiences as it is recorded in some qualitative studies about the wish to hasten death, the loss of the perception of dignity and autonomy in patients at the end of life.
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