ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experiences and meaning of supported lives for patients and practitioners, via five case studies: insulin therapy for diabetes, kidney dialysis, ventilators, intensive care units and transplants. The technical side of supported lives may have become smoother, while the human resources may have become more problematic. In intensive care units, patients lead supported lives almost like babies, reflected in language such as 'weaning off' the ventilator. Insulin, dialysis for renal failure, and organ transplants have turned terminal illness into chronic supported lives, with unavoidable side-effects. Ventilators and intensive care were usually applied over a limited span, with the aim of returning the patient to a normal life; but they carried the fearful connotation of maintaining life beyond the point of viability, as in brain death. Supported lives have raised key questions of wider social responsibility for financing expensive therapies, and deciding who receives them.
