I’ll let you in on a little secret; physicians in Canada do terminate life as we speak.
Both my parents died of cancer, and I know for a fact that my dad’s morphine dose in palliative care was increased daily to the point that that is what ultimately killed him. In fact he (being a career lab technologist and very familiar with all things regarding hospitals) may have actually requested it.
I wasn’t there when mum died, but I suspect the same.
I’ve practised some palliative care in Canada.
Withdrawal of care is considered ethical. Terminal cancer patients may refuse or be refused (after consultation with family) IV hydration, medicines apart from pain medicine, sedatives, anxiolytics and anti-sialogogues.
Increasing doses of pain medicine are not unusual.
Withdrawing care is not the same as physician assisted suicide.
I did not know you were a physician. Thank you for your insight.
Make me think that there has been anonymous polls/studies showing that in France, a lot of physicians indeed practice euthanasia despite it being forbidden (and even though I don’t remember the figures, it really was a surprisingly high percentage).
Anecdotally, hospice doctors tend to be some of the more compassionate, and there are certain features of hospice care that make quiet assisted dying easier and less prone to legal action. Not because it’s any more legal, but because we expect those in hospice to die and we don’t often perform death investigations on them, and we’re much freer with the morphine in hospice.
With my grandfather, the hospice doctor educated my grandparents thusly: “This is morphine. His dose is x milligrams every two hours. Don’t give him y milligrams, or he might go to sleep and stop breathing and die in his sleep. Do you understand, Mr. Smith? y milligrams could kill you. Take x milligrams to help you with your pain.”
It was rather elegantly handled, I thought.
(Grandpa chose to take x milligrams while he was still able to choose, and Grandma was still pondering what to do when, as always, he got tired of her dithering and made the choice for her by dying quickly and decisively.)
By that reasoning, we should be spending all our wealth and gearing our entire society to prevent death under all circumstances. Cars (indeed any vehicles that move humans at dangerous speeds) should be banned and all hospital patients should be automatically put on ventilators to maximize the odds of keeping them alive, even if they were only in for foot surgery.
It seems self-evidence to me that someone should have control over whether they end their life or not. Conversely, though, none should be compelled to assist someone else in ending their life unless euthanasia becomes tied to a doctor’s Hippocratic oath. If someone wants to die and a doctor, or anyone else frankly, is willing to assist them, I don’t see a good case for preventing it. Could it be abused? Sure, but everything can be abused, so that doesn’t seem like an argument for not allowing something that government shouldn’t have the authority to prevent in the first place.
Unacceptable perhaps, but what is also unacceptable is someone preventing another from freely acting in a manner that does not harm anyone else who has not permitted themselves to be harmed, the former imposing their views on the latter. In a free country, people have to be allowed to commit “unacceptable” private acts, even objectively unacceptable ones, if they are mutually acceptable to the involved parties.
Good grief no
You can fix that and one day they might be a happy 99 year old who can die happily ready to do the next thing.
No guarantees, an airplane engine could land on your head on the freeway in morning rush hour, but damn, give the kid half a chance?
How many different treatments for Depression would have to fail for you do decide that maybe you can’t “fix that” for that person?
For you, maybe. But for me, a life of pain and misery isn’t a life. I see no point in extending a life of suffering, when in the long run death is inevitable anyway. Would you force a beloved pet to live in pain, rather than humanely put it out of its misery? Why not be just as compassionate toward humans?
And that’s a perfect analogy. I’ve had a very beloved dog put down because it was the right thing to do.
My ex and I cried and felt miserable, but we knew it was right.
Just once, I’d like to have an end of life discussion without Smapti’s trademark “Evil! Must not be allowed! Everyone has to live forever!” comments.
If you dig through GD threads, you will find:
When he was 10, his mother did not wake him. He went downstaris where the EMT’s were working on his mother, who had swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Go read what an aspirin OD looks like, then you can comprehend the trauma of a ten year old.
She did survive.
So: when Smapti makes yet another “NEVER!” post, please just keep reading and have a bit of compassion for a traumatized 10 year old.
Smapti:
You know by the thread title that this is another "do we really have to _______________, when the patient may prefer non-existence?
Why do you put yourself through this every damned time?
Anyway:
Without going into great lengths, I have at least 5 ways to end my life at this moment*.
My standard question: you are now able to move easily and can kill yourself at will**.
You have no reason to doubt the doctor’s call that you will be bed-ridden and unable to even feed yourself in 6 months, and you will never get out of that bed alive.
What do you do?
Or: look up “Kidney Replacement” - it does not mean “transplant” except in very rare cases. It almost always means dialysis.
Look up “quality of life when relying on dialysis”.
What would you do?
** - for insurance: do not leave a note. #1 way of getting it classified “suicide”. If you want to drive into something solid, they will look for tire tracks indicating emergency braking.
If you want anecdotes…my mother blew her head open with a .357 on Easter Morning, 1980. I was the first person to discover what was left.
And…I favor legalized physician-assisted suicide for people with fatal, agonizing, and untreatable diseases.
The two things aren’t really that closely linked.
If one existed, then yes, it would be acceptable.
I’ve heard so many times that God forbids suicide. Can anyone quote a passage from the Bible saying this? And I don’t count “Thou shall not kill” because there are multiple examples where this is not valid. As a matter of fact Samson killed a multitude of people and himself. The people of Masada, who were religious killed themselves.
Its better translated though shall not murder.
What if it’s an afterlife where you only exist for 1 second?
Oddly enough, I’ve been having some related conversations lately…
Cancer can be horrific torture - but it isn’t always. My dad died just under two years ago of lung cancer, but it was a variety that caused very little pain.
I want to point out a few things about the anecdote related by the OP:
It’s a dirty little secret that chemo and/or radiation often doesn’t prolong life very much at all, and that “extra” time is often spent in abject misery due to the damage they do to the body,
My dad choose NOT to treat his cancer. Sure, it killed him in the end… but it was just the cancer doing the damage, not cancer AND chemo AND radiation. Don’t get me wrong - there are times it is entirely proper to bring out the big guns and the results can be very much worth it. It’s just sometimes instead of the bullet hitting the target the gun blows up in your face.
And there’s the rub - he was hoping for a miracle. I told several people today that I’d rather deal with a brutal reality than false hope, because in the end you will have to deal with reality anyway, and that false hope just adds another layer of pain in the end.
Look at what is actually said in that paragraph. The man went through round after round of chemo hoping it would work - if it’s not working in reality why keep doing it? It was chemo that caused the blood clots in his lungs, radiation that damaged his brain. My father also died of cancer, but he wasn’t bed-ridden until the final two weeks, he was still able to eat up until the final two weeks and even enjoy it, he could still drink, speak, and interact with people.
Maybe as much as anything else we need to re-think the necessity to “fight” the end - to “fight” cancer, to “fight” heart disease, to “fight” whatever is bringing a close to our days. We’re all going to die of something and it seems to me that at a certain point failing to accept that just makes the dying worse. Maybe if we gave people the permission to do nothing as an option without implying it’s somehow a failure (because you’re not fighting, you’re not working, you’re not doing everything) people wouldn’t be spending their final months enduring painful but futile treatments.
My father was 85 and had acquired a number of health problems in his final few years. If cancer hadn’t killed him he likely would have died of a heart attack or stroke, and if that didn’t get him liver or kidney failure was also on the horizon a couple years in the future. He wasn’t going to get another 10 or even another 5 years even if the cancer could have been eliminated. All aggressive treatment of the cancer would have done is make his final months miserable. He chose to “go home and die”, but his final 8 months were mostly pretty good, and he got out of the house quite a bit up until the final month. He didn’t spend those months throwing up or laying in bed.
Maybe fewer people would want to die if they didn’t have false hope of a miracle, if they weren’t told they had to “fight the disease”, if they weren’t pressured to “do everything”.
The problem is that you won’t know whether there’s an afterlife until you’re already dead. So, by your standards, how would you know your suicide is “acceptable” ahead of time?
But the bottom line is this: Life - THIS life - is an end in itself, and does not need to be justified in terms of any kind of afterlife. All ethical considerations end when life ends.