Hospice And Medical Aid-in-Dying: Addressing An Unethical Disconnect
"One facility used the term “provider-hastened death” and stated that it encompasses euthanasia." (Continue reading ...)
Is Aid In Dying Right For You?
"Having a sense of the possibilities in advance is essential to minimize surprises, make specific requests for end-of-life symptom management, and decide the possible paths available to you." (Continue reading ...)
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 ...)
Physician-Assisted Suicide: Should You Have A Fundamental Right To Control Your Own Death?
"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?" (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 ...)
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 ...)
Choosing Death Over Suffering: Informing Patients About Physician Aid-In-Dying (Part 1)
As more states legalize PAD and the practice becomes more ethically accepted, it is important to determine a standard of care to guide physicians. (Continue reading ...)
Respecting End-of-Life Choice: The Art of the Possible
Advocates, supporters, and champions (of MAiD) need to decide if it is better to have a law that is less than ideal … or have no law at all? Is something better than nothing? (Continue reading ...)
We Like To Talk About “A Good Death”. But How Often Does This Really Happen?
Even though I would argue that most deaths aren’t good, we improve the quality of death of the vast majority of people we care for, often substantially. And there isn’t much that’s more satisfying than that.
It just doesn’t make the death good. (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 ...)