Bioethics and religious processes among terminally ill patients in Brazil

Abstract

The techno scientific advances in the last decades have contributed to increase the number of terminally ill patients in the world. Given the millenary connection between life’s terminal phase and spiritualist processes, this fact has gained peculiar shades in Brazil, a country where the number of religious/spiritualist-oriented segments has also multiplied in the last decades. This study seeks to demonstrate that the diversification of Brazilian terminally ill patients’ needs regarding the spiritual wellbeing may bring about new bioethical dilemmas for health professionals who are not familiar with the tenets of the current main spiritualist followings in Brazil. Supporting the fact that this knowledge is an important tool for health professionals who seek to observe the principles of beneficence and patient’s autonomy, this paper provides some basic orientations of the main Brazilian spiritualist tenets about the processes of death and dying.