VSED: The Least Bad Option
“Your mother didn’t choose a terminal illness. She only chose not to let the disease pick when and how she would die.” (Continue reading ...)
Elderly Or Elder?
"We live in a culture that's intensely driven by productivity, accomplishments, and academic achievements. In doing this, we've forgotten about our wise ones, the storytellers, the original wisdom keepers, the Elders." (Continue reading ...)
Don’t Let The Patient Die
"'Don’t let the patient die'… is that the right thing or the wrong thing for a given patient? It is time for physicians to think that through more completely and allow, perhaps, a different answer." (Continue reading ...)
Pro Choice To The End Of Life
"Why would an anti-MAiD activist try to force a patient about whom they know nothing, to live by the activist’s personal values rather than the patient’s own?" (Continue reading ...)
Dying Badly In The ICU
"The sentence that sent my blood pressure skyward was this: 'Even if my patients are beyond pain, there is also a cost to those who are forced to perform emergency efforts that is just that: a performance.'” (Continue reading ...)
A Jewish Interpretation Of Death With Dignity: Seven Teachings
Jewish law states the dying are to be considered, for legal purposes, “like one who is alive for every purpose”, capable of wielding the same power over their lives until their very last moments, as they did in their days of health. (Continue reading ...)
“If I Were A Dog …”
Had she been the family's beloved old Labrador or suffering Boston Terrier, we would have taken her to the vet for a final loving, humane act, a choice unavailable to her family, doctors, or caregivers. (Continue reading ...)
Choosing Death Over Suffering: Informing Patients About Physician Aid-In-Dying (Part 2)
When determining an ethical standard of discussing physician aid in dying (PAD) during medical decision-making, it is important to begin with the caveat that physicians are not ethically obligated to assist a patient in ending his or her life, even if the physician informs the patient of the right to do so. (Continue reading ...)
Here’s to Hospice – But Not For-Profit Please
If you’re a for-profit business in the hospice business, where is your profit coming from? (Continue reading ...)
Medical Aid In Dying Is Still Called “Assisted Suicide”; An Anthropologist Explains The Problem With That
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own. (Continue reading ...)