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Abstract
The issue of pain and suffering is important to Catholic bioethics. However, it is prudent at the outset to make the distinction between the two. Pain is the physical discomfort that often accompanies illness, whereas suffering refers to the existential anguish experienced by patients when they come face to face with the loss of all that they have hoped for in the future. However, the two issues are connected. Authors like Ira Brock14,15 have pointed out that untreated physical pain can lead to an increase in suffering. Patients whose pain is untreated often experience feelings of abandonment, which in turn increases their suffering. While Catholic bioethics believes that the experience of pain and suffering is not without meaning, this belief does not imply that pain relief should be withheld in order that a patient might come to understand the redemptive nature of suffering. Control of physical pain is a patient's right and not a privilege that is meted out to those who we feel deserve it. Although personal growth may occur through suffering, the Catholic tradition does not present pain and suffering as goods in themselves. As early as the 1950s, a group of anaesthesiologists asked Pope Pius XII whether or not pain relief should be offered to a patient, if in so doing the patient's life might be unintentionally shortened. The Pope replied that painkillers should be offered if no other means existed, even if this led to unconsciousness and the inability to fulfil one's moral duties and family obligations. This judgment reflects the principle of double effect, which has a critical role in the care of the dying and specifies that "An action with 2 possible effects, one good and one bad, is morally permitted if the action: (1) is not in itself immoral, (2) is undertaken only with the intention of achieving the possible good effect, without intending the possible bad effect even though it may be foreseen, (3) does not bring about the possible good effect by means of the possible bad effect, and (4) is undertaken for a proportionately grave reason".16