Treatment and rehabilitation

"84. Diagnosis is followed by treatment and rehabilitation, in other words, the performance of those interventions that permit, as much as possible, the recovery and the personal and social reintegration of the patient...."

"85....every human being has a primary right to what is necessary for the maintenance of his own health and to adequate health care....those who care for the sick have the duty to carry out their work with the utmost diligence and to provide any treatments considered necessary or useful.176  This includes not only those aimed at  possible recovery, but also palliative treatments...."

"86. If recovery is impossible, the health care worker must never give up taking care of the person. [The footnote references 1 and 2.]  He is obliged to provide all ordinary and proportionate care....
The use of ordinary means of sustaining the patient's life is morally obligatory....
extraordinary means may be declined with the patient's consent or upon his request, even if it hastens death...."

"87. The principle of proportionality of treatment just mentioned can be explained and applied as follows:

• 'If there are no other sufficient remedies, it is permitted, with the patient's consent, to have recourse to the means provided by the most advanced medical techniques, even if these means are still at the experimental stage and are not without a certain risk.'
• 'It is also permitted, with the patient's consent, to interrupt these means, where the results fall short of expectations'  because there is no longer due proportion between 'the investment in instruments and personnel' and 'the results foreseen' or because 'the techniques applied impose on the patient strain or suffering out of proportion with the benefits which he or she may gain from such techniques.'
• 'It is also permissible to make do with the normal means that medicine can offer. Therefore one cannot impose on anyone the obligation to have recourse to a technique which is already in use but which carries a risk or is burdensome. Such a refusal is not the equivalent of suicide.'  Instead it may simply indicate "an acceptance of the human condition, or a wish to avoid the application of a medical procedure disproportionate to the results that can be expected, or a desire not to impose excessive expense on the family or the community.'181

"88. In the absence of other remedies, interventions involving the modification, mutilation, or removal of organs may be necessary to restore the person's health.  The therapeutic manipulation of the human organism is legitimate in this case by virtue of the principle of totality [182] (which for this reason is also called the therapeutic principle)...."

"89....Bodily life is a fundamental good, the condition for all the others, but there are higher values...."