Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED) with Hospice Support in America: A Case Series

From Hope Wechkin, MD

I wanted to share with you a just-published article about our experience at EvergreenHealth with VSED: Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED) with Hospice Support in America: A Case Series.

In this article Elizabeth Loggers and I report on twenty patients who pursued VSED while enrolled on EvergreenHealth Hospice. Although it’s a relatively small number of patients, it’s the first US case series on patients pursuing VSED reported in the literature, and contains some findings that surprised me: 100% of those who started VSED completed it, death occurred in under 10 days, and complications like severe anxiety and delirium and the need for medications were no different than those of the average hospice population at the end of life. I hope this will be followed by further studies and reporting from other areas of the country as we learn more about VSED.

The article has been published via Open Access and is intended to be accessible to patients/families as well as professionals, so feel free to share widely. The print journal version is still in pre-publication; when that’s complete, a final pdf version will also be available at the link above.