Internal defibrillators: "They are making the act of dying harder"

Controversy, as they interfere with peaceful deaths:

When Carol Lewis’s father-in-law died, family members circled his hospital bed to pray, expecting to offer their final goodbyes peacefully. Then his body suddenly started to lurch.

“He jumped,” said Lewis, a nurse from Hadley, Mass. “Then he jumped again, and again. It kept happening.”

Finally, two hospital staffers rushed in and placed a large magnet on the 86-year-old’s chest, deactivating a device that doctors had implanted years earlier to zap his ailing heart if it faltered.

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