Physician Assisted Suicide

[Veritas86]

I know its a loaded phrase, but that's the best way I can put it, really.

Question is, when does too much care vs. quality of life start mattering? Should docs be able to pull the plug against family wishes if they feel they know the patients wishes better? How would it be regulated?

To me, its a very interesting ethical subject.

It takes "Do no harm" and puts it in a different context. Is bad quality of life more harmful than letting a patient die? And who gets to decide?

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[Suncrusher]

We just had an ethics session on this at my med school, we learned from Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics, if you really want a strong understanding of the principles at play. Your question is a bit of a conflation of several topics and requires a lot of underlying knowledge about the principle of autonomy, beneficence and nonmaleficence, withholding vs withdrawing, weighing benefits and burdens, quality of life, and physician assisted suicide (different from "pulling the plug," which usually refers to withdrawing treatment). There is absolutely no way I can explain in a few paragraphs what most authors lay out in hundreds of pages, so I recommend referring to the source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide_in_the_United_States This gives a good understanding of the current regulations in the pacific northwest USA that have worked very well so far as far as assisted suicide goes.