Considerations include individual health beliefs which may be quite misguided about the course of an illness, and what relief is or is not available for it, reluctance to use analgesia often because of unrealistic fears about addiction and experience of subtle coercion. A euthanasia request may be an indication of an unsolved symptom problem. Psychiatric assessment in this context is not just a matter of whether a major depressive illness is present.
A person may feel coerced, and that they are a nuisance to family and the community and have quite distorted fears about an illness, but appear superficially to be of "sound mind". A recent Scottish parliamentary committee examining a bill to legalise assisted suicide stated: "There is no way to guarantee the absence of coercion in the context of assisted suicide".
The attitudes of family and professional practitioners are crucial in the management of seriously ill people. If the messageconveyed is that "your life is not worth living", ill people pick upon it very quickly. I myself, despite years of professional practice, have experienced the common ambivalence towards a seriously ill relative.
Part of you wants the person to live, but part of you wants the whole thing over and done with. How would it then be possible to ensure that relatives, or even nursing or medical staff, are not coercing ill patients into "requesting" assisted suicide. What if such people were to benefit financially from the patient's death? What if some family members are against such a solution and others are for it? What legal actions might follow family allegations that their relative was pushed into it?
What if palliative care measures have not actually been exercised properly, and hence suffering is unrelieved because best treatment has not actually been used?
What if the problem is that a relative is actually the one most distressed, not the actual patient, but there is pressure to end the patient's illness by assisted suicide? Theo Boer is a Dutch medical ethicist who has changed his mind on euthanasia. To the Editor: The recent case in the media to motivate active euthanasia is tragic. A doctor dying of cancer in New Zealand, tried to starve herself to death, which suggests that she was deeply depressed, because suicidal ideation 'appears exclusively linked to mental disorder'.
He became drawn into her desperation, was not medically trained, and did not consider her to be depressed. At her request, he eventually gave her an overdose of crushed morphine pills that she had hoarded for the purpose.
He was arraigned on a charge of murder. This is a sad story of terminal care gone wrong, and a rebuke to her medical caregivers. This case should surely not gain sympathy for an idea that medical practitioners have rejected since Hippocrates. But surely such abuse can only happen with a government such as Germany had under the Nazis?
Eugenics started as a 'good idea' before the Nazis took control. The regulations were initially tighter than those in our own Law Commission's draft regulations on voluntary euthanasia of Consider the experience of Holland. In , a physician gave her mother a lethal injection, which became the focus of a national campaign to legalise assisted suicide. Sawyer was indicted for first-degree criminal mistreatment and first-degree aggravated theft, partly over criminal mistreatment of Thomas Middleton.
But the Oregon state agency responsible for the assisted suicide law never even noticed. Self-Administration Patrick Matheny [17] received his assisted suicide prescription by Federal Express. Commenting on the Matheny case, Dr. Another anonymous patient: Dr. Moreover, once injectable pentobarbital leaves the pharmacy, there is nothing to prevent it from being used through an intravenous IV line, or as a lethal injection.
If a patient or someone assisting appears to have used a feeding tube or an injection, abuse is far more difficult to detect and prove. Wagner , a year-old great-grandmother, had recurring lung cancer. Her physician prescribed Tarceva to extend her life. Wendy Melcher [24] died in August after two Oregon nurses, Rebecca Cain and Diana Corson, gave her overdoses of morphine and phenobarbital. No criminal charges have been filed against the two nurses.
Jones, John Avery, and three other patients were killed by illegal overdoses of medication given to them by a nurse, and none of these cases have been prosecuted in Oregon. Speaking at Portland Community College, pro-assisted-suicide attorney Cynthia Barrett [28] described one botched assisted suicide. Well, she called He died shortly — some … period of time after that …. Because the doctor who wrote the prescription, the emergency medical technicians and the hospital reported nothing.
Because [the assisted-suicide law]reporting requirements are a sham. After being unconscious for 65 hours, he awoke.
0コメント