What's worse: Watching him doing something bad or forcing him not to do it?

Something I hear on my way to work after getting up at 4:20 am.
Yesterday on my way home I got stuck in a traffic jam, I wondered: "Maybe an accident or something bad happened?" But then, under a bridge with seriously no way to drive around the obstruction (because it was on an Autobahn..) I saw what caused all the anger and stress.
A little car broke down. And while I dodged the car, driving app. 15 kmh per hour, I saw the driver and his passengers. Old people, looking confused..

Call me mean, but that did not surprise me.
Probably they did not even have a mobile phone to call for help. They stayed in the car, without putting up a warning triangle or anything.. Ohhh.. Old people.. We get along so great before we met at work, didn't we?

Anyway. What I really wanted to blog about was something we had a discussion at work about today.
There is this man, he is maybe as old as my mum. He will die. I don't need to be a magician to see that. He is allowed to drink one litre per day. He drinks maybe four because he forces his wife to bootleg coke, snacks, Capri pouch packs, cold Sauerkraut in cans. Yum. And then he complains about the water dripping out of his pores on his legs. No fucking lie. It's like a human fountain.
I told him to stop drinking so much, because his heart just can't take it anymore. The other nurses told him to stop drinking so much. Every doctor told him to stop doing so.
Our team assistant told me today: "You have to throw away all of this snacks and drinks!"
and I replied: "Um.. No? Is he a grown man? I think so. Plus: He is neither suffering from dementia nor is he under the control of psycho-social care or whatever.
I told him to stop drinking so much, he continues.
I'm not his mommy.
Plus I think there is a certain personal responsibility concerning his illness and his treatment."

She did not agree with me.

I found two quotes which suit this whole situation:

"If something is bad, the opposite doesn't has to be good. That's reasonable, isn't it?
The opposite of bad is not always good, but sometimes it's even worse." - Watzlawick

and a little part out of a poem of Erich Kästner.

It's called "The violence"

"Violence does not begin if ill people get killed, violence begins if someone says: You are ill, you have to do what I tell you..."


Update:

He is dead. He died one or two weeks ago at our intensive care ward.
Even though he already lost twelve kilos (because his wife was not allowed to take her bag inside) his heart just simply couldn't take it anylonger.