I was reading the following article and thought it was worthy of kicking around here on GD. The upshot, essentially, is a woman drank antifreeze in order to commit suicide. She then called an ambulance and upon arrival at the hospital (or somewhere in there) handed the doctors a Living Will she had written explicitly saying she refused ALL medical treatment. The doctors felt that was sufficient and, basically, let her die.
For myself I find myself conflicted over what I would consider the proper response for the doctors in this case. I do not think the doctors should be punished here since this is clearly a new one with no good guidelines. Still, in the future, should doctors go ahead and treat an attempted suicide regardless of what the person doing it wishes and how clear they have been about their wishes?
I think the Doctors acted appropriately. She was lucid enough to make her decision. She clearly wanted to die. Though why she chose such a gruesome and painful way to die, I don’t know.
Personally, I’m okay with the concept of people being in control of their own lives, including the end of their lives.
What I’m not okay with is calling an ambulance, having yourself taken to a hospital, basically making a spectacle of your suicide and causing a lot of grief and conflict among the people who have made it their job to save your life. Go shoot yourself quietly in the woods, please.
For that matter, my thought is that her calling the ambulance should overrule the letter. Once you call the ambulance for your own self, you should expect that they’ll try to save your life.
Do Living Wills require psych evals or verification of mental competence or witnessing or anything like that? Can you just write ‘Don’t help me’ on a piece of paper and sign it and no one can do anything to help you?
Anti-freeze is mostly ethylene glycol, which is metabolized in the body to glycolic acid, which causes acidosis, and eventually to oxalic acid, which is toxic in its own right.
Looks like “it depends” depending on where you live (including differing state-to-state).
This happened in Great Britain so I do not know. Reading the bit below (specifically the last sentence) I would presume US doctors would need to try to save you since your survival is not clearly “hopeless”. And if it is hopeless then beyond making you comfortable not sure what they are expected to do.
Funny, but yeah. The standard treatment for antifreeze poisoning is to administer large doses of ethyl alcohol, to block the metabolization of ethylene glycol.
In Vermont, I filled out the papers and had my neighbors sign that they witnessed me sign. That’s it. You can choose to register the Living Will with the state but you don’t have to.
I don’t understand this case either–if she wanted to be sure she’d die, don’t call the ambulance. If it was to get pain treatment while she died, she could have chosen a different method to begin with.
Let’s assume that the suicidee doesn’t want to be discovered by family or when she’s all gross and smelly, and that she doesn’t want to leave behind a blood-spattered mess. Dying in a hospital is friendly to your neighbors and family. Death by poisoning is more-or-less clean.
While as if you blow the top of your head off or jumped off the roof of a moderately tall building, then you’ve just inconvenienced a lot people who are in no way expected to have to deal with that sort of thing. Doctors and hospitals are expected to and set up to deal with a dying person and everything that goes on afterward.
Isn’t there some kind of public policy exception to any document of this type? For example, what if I put in my living will, “I direct the doctor to call the local escort service and have fellatio performed on me as I depart this life, the cost to be paid from my estate” then clearly that can’t be mandated to be honored.
And since assisted suicide is illegal, wouldn’t that be the same?
But she held medical professionals “hostage” and forced them to watch her voluntarily end her own life, absent any grave or terminal illness. That’s not what doctors and nurses are expected to deal with.
Such cases will definitely contribute to staff burnout.
She could have contacted the local Hemlock society to learn about better options. Like seeking a less permanent solution to her temporary problems, to start with.
At the moment there isn’t a place where one can reasonably go and off himself without causing someone a hassle.
Personally, I’d be perfectly happy to have a few places in the US where a person walks in, slaps down a $100 and then can sit back in a chair, pull a lever, and have a guillotine blade come down to lop off their head. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, so either way you’re talking about balancing evils.