Originally posted by mashce
Euthanasia or doctor assisted suicide is incredibly wrong, but in addition it can get out of control scarily fast. Look at the Christian Medical and Dental Society website and you'll see some stuff that will send a shiver down your spine. In countries where assisted suicide has been accepted there has a rise in depression and feelings of guilt among elderly people, and there have been several cases where the elderly were killed without their permission, in one case because the hospital needed another open bed! The minute we start saying that the life of anyone, even someone incredibly sick or old is not worth living anymore, that their life is not valuable we're in big trouble.... Can we say Hitler and the Nazis.... Disrespect for the elderly and the mentally handicapped and then the killing of many of the mentally handicapped marked the beginning of Hitler's rule in Germany...
wow. very harsh words, some of which is anecdotal. I am not going to try and prove Mashce wrong (my opinion is quite different) but all I want to say to those of you reading this is PLEASE do your own research and don't feel like you have to go with the general consensus.
There is nothing inherently evil in physician assisted suicide. In fact, most physicians will not confess to this but it IS done in hospitals around the country in "secrecy." I don't mean to say that doctors out there actually practise PAS, but don't fool yourself when you believe that a doctor doesn't know the therapeutic index value being reached of a medication that is being prescribed in increasing doses. Sure, it can be blamed on an "accident" or you can say the doc was only trying to relieve pain and did not know that death could have been caused with such increasing (and sometimes lethal) doses...but who would be there to prove it???
Again, I urge everybody to do their own research and decide. If you actually look at the statistics from after 1997 after Oregon made it legal you'd see that there has been no exploitation going on. The cases you hear about where a patient was euthanized because of the need of a hospital is only anecdotal. Let's not make rules from these stories!! The Dutch had formed a commission that actually measured the effects of legalizing euthanasia longitudinallya nd have demonstrated that there has been no significant increases in the number of deaths resulting from PAS over time. Even the number of deaths tallied by the Oregon Health Division has not increased significantly over the last 3-4 years since they made it legal. Furthermore, if you look at societies that have legalized euthanasia, you'd learn about the strict regulations they have to make sure that our patients do not get exploited. Please don't be mistaken that doctors in these societies are not advocates for their patients. Most of them (like in any other medical society all over the world) do care for their patients very well and do provide palliative care before their patients are euthanized.
Also, there was a comment about depression among these patients. I don't have the values on this but let me tell you that depression goes hand in hand with having a terminal illness. How can one prove for sure that the terminal illness is not the confounding factor between your correlation between depression and use of PAS in a society? About 10 percent of depressed patients never get cured, and one would think that these physicians are having their patients evaluated professionally for competency to make sure that depression is not causing suicidal ideations in these patients.
You would be surprized to hear that a majority of doctors have actually HAD requests for PAS (this is before Oregon made it legal so the numbers may be even higher in the last few years); over 3/4 of those doctors said that these patients should have had the option of PAS and over half of them actually said that they would practise euthanasia if it were legal. So what is stopping docs from practising it? It is the law. Unfortunately, morality and legality do not always go hand in hand, and here is a case where you see that although patients and doctors DO think it is a workable option, it is not enforced (and rightfully so, because I do acknowledge the need to have strict regulation if it were legalized).
Anyway, I am getting close to trying to prove my point over mashce, and I don't intend to do that. All I'm saying is keep your ears and eyes open to learn about these issues. In societies where PAS is legal, patients ARE being served. Who are we as physicians to decide the time and manner of the patient's death? Let our patients do the talking, and as polls have demonstrated, we may be causing a shift in opinion toward promoting PAS in some societies. No offense Mashce, but I was genuinely hurt by your point about comparing docs that support PAS with Hitler and Nazis. Those people killed WITHOUT CONSENT. These two words in medicine make all the difference.
In an ideal world, we would know about consent for any and every patient that walks through our clinic. But we don't. So we try and make do best with what we have. In such situations, they use healthcare proxies (which may/may not work). But by no means would a doctor say, "hmmm, whom am I going to kill today." Medicine is still a profession of compassion and dignity. It's just that some doctors view giving a person the right to live and die in a time and manner they choose, as compassionate care also. You are not choosing to end their lives. We are simply the tools patients may use to achieve the goal of passing on in a manner they want. Whew.
🙂 Thank you for putting up with my long-a@@ post and please, no flames. We are only posting opinions here.
