Here is a link to a blog post by Dr. Peter Saunders on a confidential draft paper from the British Medical Association on withdrawing food and water from patients with dementia, stroke and brain injury who are not imminently dying. The draft says that such patients who lack mental capacity but who are not imminently dying “can be starved and dehydrated to death in their supposed ‘best interests’.” Saunders states that “this is actually nothing other than euthanasia by stealth—euthanasia by the back door.” Saunders also states: “Once we accept that food and fluids by tube is ‘medical treatment’ rather than basic care and that providing this basic sustenance to someone with a medical condition they would not find ‘acceptable’ is not in their ‘best interests’, then we are inviting professionals to devise a simple scheme whereby the starvation of large numbers of non-dying but expensive and ‘burdensome’ patients can be achieved simply and efficiently, and largely undetected, without involving the courts” .