A court decision on the rights of terminally-ill patients places doctors in “an impossibly difficult” position, the Court of Appeal has heard.

The General Medical Council (GMC) is appealing against last year’s High Court ruling, which stopped doctors from withdrawing treatment from a seriously ill man.

Forty-five-year-old Leslie Burke, who suffers from a degenerative brain condition, brought the case to the High Court last year, because he feared that, under current GMC guidelines, his desire to continue living until he dies naturally could be overridden and doctors could withhold food and water from him.

Mr Justice Munby ruled that the majority of the GMC’s guidelines were in place to reassure patients and their relatives, but said that he took issue with them “in a limited number of respects” and ruled parts to be unlawful.

At the Court of Appeal today, Phillip Havers QC, representing the GMC, argued that the ruling was not in the best interests of patients and would require doctors to provide treatment, which would not be beneficial to the patients and could even be harmful. Mr Havers also said that the ruling would adversely affect the doctor/patient relationship and placed doctors in an “impossibly difficult position”, because doctors should never have to provide treatment to patients, which they do not consider to be “clinically appropriate”.

Mr Havers said that doctors had a “professional duty” not to provide such treatment to patients.

Mr Burke’s lawyers have said that the judgement represented a shift in power away from doctors and the medical profession to patients and the courts.

However, Mr Burke, who suffers from cerebellar ataxia – a term which covers disorders of the nervous system which affect co-ordination – says that if food and water was withheld from him, it could take him up several days to die. He told reporters today that this was “not a dignified way to go”.

(KMcA/SP)