“What is fundamentally the difference between a doctor pulling a plug on a machine that provides lifesaving nutrients to a person that could potentially stay ‘alive’ on it for years, and a doctor prescribing pills to a person with mere days or months to live to end their unnecessary suffering?”
“‘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.”
“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?”
“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.’”
Although many individuals shy away from contemplating the inevitability of death, most would agree that they would like to die well. A new review of existing literature, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, asks what makes a “good death” according to those involved in the process.
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.
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.
Final Exit Network’s blog has had over 105,000 views since its inception.
We had a a rare reason to celebrate last week when the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) pulled back on its threat to curtail the boom in “telemedicine” that allowed us to deal with COVID-19.
These stories are not for everyone, but they are topics that the author believes shouldn’t remain in the silence.
