Nancy Neveloff Dubler, mediator for the last moments of life, dies at 82

A bioethicist, she pioneered bedside methods to help patients, their families and doctors cope with distressing life or death decisions. death in the high-tech age. Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a medical ethicist who pioneered the use of hospital bedside mediation to manage complex dynamics between stubborn doctors, anguished family members and patients in their final days, died in April. 14 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 82 years old.

The cause was heart and lung disease, her family said.

A A Harvard graduate lawyer who won her student presidency by campaigning to disband student government, Ms. Dubler was a revolutionary figure in the health care sector who sought, in her words, to “level the playing field” and “amplify the non-medical voices” in difficult medical situations. especially when it comes to deciding next steps for the sickest patients.

In 1978, Ms. Dubler founded the Bioethics Consultation Service at the medical center Montefiore in the Bronx. Among the first such teams in the country, the service employed lawyers, bioethicists and even philosophers who, like doctors on call, carried pagers alerting them to pressing ethical issues.

Image Modern medical technology, Ms. Dubler wrote in her 1992 book, "allows us to take a body suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage massive, to connect him to a machine and keep his organs nominally “alive”, functional on a bed, with no hope of recovery. our time working with doctors, nurses and social workers,” Ms. Dubler wrote with her co-author, David Nimmons, in “Ethics On Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life-and-Death Choices » (1992). ). “We start where they are stuck, in the web of rights and responsibilities that ensnare all patients and their caregivers.”

Bioethics consultants have become a medical subspecialty following revolutionary technological advances. , pharmaceuticals and surgical techniques.

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