Study finds many doctors disregard wishes of cancer patients. Frequently, patients with advanced cancer simply want to be made as comfortable as possible as they wind down their final days. Many of these patients are receiving treatment focused on extending their lives rather than easing their pain.

[u/mvea]

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2025/08/26/cancer-patients-treatment-wishes-study/7921756217134/

[u/Protean_Protein]

Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the main concocters of the mythos around her, and a billion Catholics ate up the idea that she was “helping the poor in India”—presumably most of them innocently believed that that meant giving them access to proper medical care. But all it was was proselytizing and glorying in suffering.

[u/notyourstranger → u/[deleted]]

How did she comfort them? Did she ensure they had pain medicine? Did she advocate for palliative care? Or did she pray for them and speak words of comfort during a time when it was possible to provide actual physical comfort?

Imagine somebody is dying from cancer. It's painful to breathe for them. Medicine exists to reduce their suffering. Giving them that medicine is the moral action. NOT giving them medicine is immoral.

Pretending that praying is an appropriate action is virtue signaling and immoral.

I'm asking cause I don't know the history and I'd rather not mess up my feed by doing a search on her.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/[deleted]]

She didn’t think she was a sadist, but her treatment of the poor and sick was worse than it otherwise might have been had she not had the religious convictions that she professed to have (despite a “dark night of the soul”).

[u/just_a_wolf → u/Protean_Protein]

This just isn't true. I don't know why people have such a hate on for Mother Theresa, I'm sure some of her religious beliefs were pretty intense, but all the stuff about her letting people suffer without pain medicine because of her religious beliefs is BS. Pain meds were regulated in India at the time and were not available to them.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/just_a_wolf]

Not just her but the entire organization.

[u/notyourstranger → u/just_a_wolf]

I want to learn more. I've heard her accused of "kidnapping children" but to me it read more like she tried to give these children better lives by getting them new parents. I know little about India's history and I honestly can't tell if she's being demonized (if so by whom and for what reason?) or if she did the best any human could under the circumstances.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/notyourstranger]

The criticism is that if her organization had not been ideologically Christian of the sort that it was, then more could have been done. Her focus on “soul saving” and some other issues with how the ill were handled is the criticism. It’s not just a demonization campaign, but a sober reckoning that came during the Church’s beatification and canonization process.

Plus, like, people have been afraid to speak frankly about her, especially after she was made a saint.