Assisted Suicide

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Recommended: Physician assisted suicide, the right to choose

Is the role of a medical professional to ensure the health and comfort of their patients, or to help them end their lives? Since Dr. Kevorkian assisted in the suicide of Janet Adkins in 1990, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) has been one of the most controversial issues in the medical field today. While some view it as an individual right, others view it as an unethical issue that goes against medical ethics and religious values. Mr. H. M. is an elderly man who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and no chance of improvement. After excruciating pain and suffering, he has decided to request physician-assisted death in his home state of Oregon. Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (DDA) states that terminally ill patients are allowed to use lethal medications prescribed by the physician to terminate their lives.3 There is a renowned tradition in medicine that health-care professionals must do everything in their power to keep a patient alive, thus making PAS inconsistent with the responsibility of doctors as healers. Although physician-assisted suicide is proposed as a means toward a more gentle and humane way of dying, it threatens the foundation of the medical profession’s ethical integrity.

Assisted suicide is when the physician provides a competent patient with lethal drugs or some other medical means while aware the patient is contemplating suicide. Unlike euthanasia, it is the patient that ultimately determines the outcome of the medicine.6 Many confuse assisted suicide with palliative treatment that may accelerate a patient’s death, also known as the double effect. However, palliative treatment is used to strictly alleviate a patient’s pain and suffering, not to end the patient’s life. Death is only a possible side effect of ...

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Physician-assisted suicide will damage the fundamental values of our medical profession today. There are many aspects of PAS that validate it is an unethical and murderous act. Every one should determine the value of his or her life, but someone of greater power, not the doctor, should determine death. Physician-assisted suicide will always be a moral and ethical dilemma in the health care world, but death should be as natural as birth. All religions and cultures disagree with the practice of suicide. Legalizing it now would only contradict years of tradition and laws that the medical profession worked hard to maintain. With the advanced expertise in the medical profession today, along with comforting health-care professionals, spiritual counseling, and pain relief, there is no reason a patient should have to die before God has made that decision.

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