Category Archives: Doctor-Prescribed Suicide

Physician Assisted Suicide is Dangerous for Everyone

Tuesday, 02 April 2019 12:39
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Pills

 

Source: PennLive.com

By Karl Benzio, M.D.

Being a psychiatrist for 30 years, I’ve successfully cared for thousands of patients, many critically or terminally ill throughout the United States and experiencing severe trauma in Uganda and Iraq. I see desperate people with unimaginable pain and realize contemplating suicide is complex and never occurs lightly.

But, allowing anyone, especially doctors, to help kill a person, is dangerous to patients, doctors, the healthcare system, and society, especially when much better and safer options exist. The real solution needs to combine proper expertise with true compassion.

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Hopkins Doctor: Assisted Suicide is Unethical and Dangerous

Thursday, 21 February 2019 15:26
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Elderly holding hands

 

By: Joseph Marine

Source: Baltimore Sun

For the past five years, advocates of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have tried and failed to pass legislation that legalizes the practice in Maryland. Proponents of PAS are back again with the same dangerous, unethical, discriminatory, unnecessary and hopelessly flawed bill. As a physician who has been in practice for almost 20 years and has treated thousands of patients in all conditions of life, I urge the legislature and the citizens of Maryland to continue to reject it for many reasons.

PAS, also euphemistically termed “aid-in-dying,” refers to the prescribing of a non-FDA approved lethal overdose of a drug or combination of drugs to a person believed to have a terminal illness. PAS is unethical. It is specifically prohibited by the Hippocratic Oath and opposed by the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Nurses Association, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the World Medical Association.

PAS is not medical care. It has no basis in medical science or medical tradition. It is not taught in medical schools or residency training programs. The drug concoctions used to end patients’ lives with PAS come from the euthanasia movement and not from the medical profession or medical research.

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Candy Coating Assisted Suicide

Monday, 18 February 2019 11:50
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elderly by the sea

By: T. Brian Callister

Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal

As a practicing physician and medical school professor with more than 30 years of experience, I know firsthand that hospice and palliative care are wonderful and underutilized resources for the terminally and chronically ill. One should also note that refusing medical interventions and medications at the end of life is both a reasonable and ethical option at times.

On the other hand, physician-assisted suicide — which could be on the agenda during Nevada’s current legislative session and is now being referred to by the candy-coated label “medical-aid-in-dying” — is an ethically absurd and morally corrupt intervention. It is overt killing at its very core.

First and foremost, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) creates perverse incentives to prematurely kill, not to just “aid in dying.” It also turns the physician into a complicit partner in this outright killing.

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I depend on life support. Why I oppose assisted suicide…

Monday, 29 October 2018 11:28
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Diane Coleman assisted suicide

Source: Star-Ledger

By Diane Coleman

I have an advanced neuromuscular condition and must use breathing support with a mask 18 hours a day. As a severely disabled person who depends on life-sustaining treatment, I would be able to qualify for assisted suicide at any time where it is legal.

If I became despondent, for example if I lost my husband or my job, and decided that I wanted to die, I would not be treated the same as a nondisabled, healthy person who despaired over divorce or job loss.

If anyone doubted that someone like me would qualify for assisted suicide in a state like Oregon, those doubts were laid to rest in December 2017 when an Oregon Public Health Department official clarified in writing:

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The Deadly Advocacy of Assisted Suicide

Thursday, 11 October 2018 17:49
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Assisted suicide image

Source: Washington Times

By Dr. G. Kevin Donovan

The announcement encourages residents to think about assisted suicide and offers resources which help a person pursue it, while all other organizations are trying to find ways to prevent suicide, and help those most in need, and at risk. Aren’t public service announcements supposed to call attention to a message that is in the public interest? Running announcements of this nature is reckless and dangerous, especially during the month dedicated to suicide prevention.

It is no wonder that the assisted-suicide lobby has resorted to such tactics — this dangerous public policy is so unpopular here that in the first year after the District of Columbia enacted a law to allow assisted suicide, not one person killed themselves with a doctor’s help, as the new law sanctions. In fact, during that time only two out of nearly 11,000 licensed D.C. physicians were willing to participate, and just one hospital cleared doctors to be involved.

Instead of veiled advertisements for assisted suicide from advocates, patients and physicians deserve to be given the facts, including the attendant abuses, and to know why so few doctors and hospitals are participating.

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