By M. Zuhdi Jasser
Source: Washington Examiner
Even in our modern age of miraculous scientific advancements, some medical professionals are working to drag us back to the dark ages. In a recent collaborative opinion article, Doctors Josh Bloom and Henry Miller used the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease as the case in point why we should liberalize even more the regulation of physician-assisted suicide.
These doctors do themselves, and the rest of the medical community, a grave disservice.
In their article, they write, “If the goal of physician-assisted suicide is to prevent unnecessary suffering, then why are Alzheimer’s patients and their families forced to suffer for years with no recourse while people with a shorter-duration terminal disease that don’t impair their thinking have the right to choose their own fates?”
This is not only a vast oversimplification of the options available to patients in allowing natural death through palliative and hospice care, but it is a gross expansion of physician-assisted suicide which would shake the foundations of the practice of medicine in America and the doctor-patient relationship.
Furthermore, they are opening the doors for a family member, or another surrogate, to push for assisted suicide instead of the patient, which implies that it would no longer even be suicide. In Alzheimer’s cases, their mental incapacity takes the choice out of the hands of the patient, as they can no longer make critical decisions. Further normalizing assisted suicide, more accurately here “assisted killing,” would take our society frighteningly closer to sanctioning and encouraging euthanasia as is seen in Europe.
The American Medical Association’s official position on assisted suicide is that, “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” The AMA is entirely correct in assuming this stance. For physicians to begin prescribing assisted suicide to patients would erode faith in the medical system entirely.
Proponents of physician-assisted suicide argue that certain safeguards and measures are in place to prevent abuse. However, these safeguards are nothing but a farce, and in many areas here in the United States they amount to merely asking a willing doctor to write a prescription. They include no requirement for a mental health evaluation, and there is no rule that the prescribing physician has any prior patient-physician relationship with those seeking assisted suicide.
Additionally, physicians are legally indemnified. Any medical records connected to the administration of assisted suicide are protected from subpoena power, making investigations into questionable assisted suicide cases nearly impossible.
Make no mistake: There is no “healthcare” involved in writing a prescription for a lethal dose of a medication. In many states, a simple patient signature is all that is required for a doctor of medicine to deem a patient worthy of “aid in dying” — the Orwellian term concocted to spin what is really physician-assisted suicide. There is no aid nor dying — it is simply self-killing.
Yes, medical professionals should always be learning how to better engage patients in their most vulnerable times at the end-of-life. Palliative care and hospice care are good ways to mitigate, and in many cases, resolve suffering at the end-of-life.
The hijacking by the physician-assisted suicide movement of the practice of medicine, long founded upon the sanctity of a “natural life,” shatters the foundations of the doctor-patient covenant. Patients with terminal conditions, or even those with “quasi-terminal” conditions like Alzheimer’s, can be “allowed to die a natural death” through comfort-only measures. The narrative that even without interventions as basic as antibiotics, various medications, and artificial hydration and nutrition, many patients will still live interminable long suffering lives is simply false.
Patients who witness the “House of Medicine” become a party to physician-assisted suicide, and should rightly be concerned about whether their own physician or medical institution may be sliding down the slippery slope of assisted suicide rather than their covenant to preserve natural life.
If society insists on giving patients access to prescriptions for self-killing, then at least leave physicians out of it.
Most of the foundations of medical ethics are derived from a faith-based respect for the sanctity of a God-given life. There is no moral equivalence whatsoever between the allowing of a natural death from disease through withdrawal of care on the one hand, and giving a lethal dose of a medication that will cause certain death on the other.
Doctors should always want to preserve and extend the lives of their patients, otherwise they fail to merit their patient’s trust. Facilitating someone’s death in any way should never be considered “care.”
M. Zuhdi Jasser, MD FACP, is a physician in the private practice of internal medicine in Phoenix and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He is a lead bioethicist for a major national healthcare institution and a past-president of the Arizona Medical Association. You can find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser.