The Case Of Physician Assisted Suicide

Who gets to make the choice whether someone lives or dies? If a person has the right to live, they certainly should be able to make the choice to end their own life. The law protects each and everyone’s right to live, but when a person tries to kill themselves more than likely they will end up in a Psychiatric unit. Today we hear more and more about the debate of Physician assisted suicide and where this topic stands morally and ethically. Webster 's dictionary defines Physician assisted suicide as, suicide by a patient facilitated by means (as a drug prescription) or by information (as an indication of a lethal dosage) provided by a physician who is aware of the patient 's intent (Webster, 1977).

According to Mirror News, In October of 2014 a women named Charlotte Fitzmaurice Wise was watching her daughter Nancy Fitzmaurice suffer from pain. She was born with Hydrocephalus and septicaemia which made it impossible for her to walk, talk, eat or drink. She required around the clock care and was fed through tubes. As time went on her health worsened and she would scream in pain even though she was injected with morphine. Wise believed that her daughter was in excruciating pain and deserved to be at peace. Wise submitted an application to end her daughter’s misery, and soon her application would be approved. She was able to relieve her daughter from pain, and made it legal in the United Kingdom for a parent to end their critically ill child’s life if they are disable and can’t speak for themselves.

Did you know, about 57% of physicians today have received a request for physician assisted suicide due to suffering from a terminally ill patient. Suffering has always been a part of human existence, and these requests have been occurring since medicine has been around. Moreover, there are two principles that all organized medicine agree upon. The first one is physicians have a responsibility to relieve pain and suffering of dying patients in their care. The second one is physicians must respect patients’ competent decisions to decline life-sustaining treatment. Basically, these principles state the patients over the age of 18 that are mentally stable have the right to choose to end their life if they are suffering from pain. As of right

of life. Death is inevitable. Why should each of us not have the right to

1. (problem – PAS): In today’s society, Physician Assisted Suicide is one of the most questionable and debatable issues. Many people feel that it is wrong for people to ask their doctor to help them end their life; while others feel it is their right to choose between the right to life and the right to death. “Suffering has always been a part of human existence.” (PAS) “Physicians have no similar duty to provide actions, such as assistance in suicide, simply because they have been requested by patients. In deciding how to respond to patients ' requests, physicians should use their judgment about the medical appropriateness of the request.” (Bernat, JL) Physician Assisted Suicide differs from withholding or discontinuing medical treatment, it consists of doctors providing a competent patient with a prescription for medication to aid in the use to end their life.

Physician-assisted suicide is a controversial subject all around the world. Although it is legal in some countries and states, such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Oregon, Montana, Washington, and Vermont it is not yet legal in most (Finlay, 2011). People travel from all around the world to these locations to receive information. Physician-assisted suicide is when terminally ill and mentally capable patients perform the final act themselves after being provided with the required means and information. The elemental causes found for physician-assisted suicide include: terminal cancer, mental and behavioral disorders, diseases of the nervous system, disease of the circulatory system, and diseases of the musculoskeletal system

Since 1994, Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) has been legal in the state of Oregon. The law allows patients diagnosed as having less than six months to live to decide when they will die. Sadly, death is a fact of life. Losing a loved one to debilitating disease or terminal illness is an experience to which an increasing number of Americans can relate. Every day new cases of cancer, ALS, and other painful, potentially fatal diseases are diagnosed in the US. The American Cancer Society estimates that over 22,000 new cancer cases will be reported in 2015 in Oregon alone, with roughly 8,000 subsequently dying. Faced with such overwhelming diagnoses, many patients choose to fight; other patients opt to spend their remaining time with their families,

There is so much controversy about physician assisted suicide. There is even controversy about the wording itself. Some call it physician assisted suicide, while others refuse to use the word suicide at all, in correlation to the meaning of this subject, which I will discuss later. There are a few different ways to say it, but all mean basically the exact same thing; death with dignity, end of life option, aid in dying, and the right to die. No one wants to die. But the harsh reality is that when a person is diagnosed with a terminal illness, it is a life changing diagnosis, literally. No one likes the idea of dying, no matter how it is phrased, maybe the reason it is so terrifying is none of us have ever died before to talk about it,

The topic I chose to write about is Physician-assisted suicide. My position on the topic is that I agree with physician-assisted suicide because it helps terminal ill people end their suffering faster than if they waited until the illness took their life away. Also, the terminal ill person decides that he/she wants to end his or hers life with a clear conscious knowing what is going to happen to them taking the physician-assisted suicide route to end their suffering. By the terminal ill person deciding that they want to end their life with physician-assisted suicide they are helping out their family. They help their family by reducing their pain that they feel and also by helping them financially because it is cheaper to end their life with

In majority of the cases where patients requested help with their demise, the diagnoses included cancer, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and various neurological diseases. The article states further that primary patient concerns, while typically nonphysical, included being a burden on their families and caregivers, loss of control of physical and mental capacities to function, being reliant on others for personal, private care, and diminished self-esteem and dignity. The chief conclusions drawn from this study include that most individuals requesting life-ending prescriptions from their physicians are doing so with primarily intangible, nonphysical worries in mind. Perhaps more surprisingly, most physicians do not consult their work-associates regularly about these appeals. Without guidance from other physicians and regulations verified by higher authorities, there is reason to question how doctors are able to guarantee both quality and equality in the assessment of patient appeals for physician-assisted suicide. This article both stresses the desire for dignified death by individuals suffering from terminal illnesses and the importance of having the practice regulated to protect both patients and physicians

The issues of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) are both emotional and controversial. Some argue PAS is ethically permissible for a dying person who has chosen to escape unbearable suffering at the end of life; it is the physician’s duty to alleviate the patient’s suffering and justifies aid-in-dying. These arguments rely on the respect for individual autonomy. “Individual autonomy is an idea that is generally understood to refer to the capacity to be one's own person, to live one's life according to reasons and motives that are taken as one's own and not the product of manipulative or distorting external forces.” (STANDFORD REF)

In today’s society, suicide, and more controversially, physician assisted suicide, is a hotly debated topic amongst both every day citizens and members of the medical community. The controversial nature of the subject opens up the conversation to scrutinizing the ethics involved. Who can draw the line between morality and immorality on such a delicate subject, between lessening the suffering of a loved one and murder? Is there a moral dissimilarity between letting someone die under your care and killing them? Assuming that PAS suicide is legal under certain circumstances, how stringent need be these circumstances? The patient must be terminally ill to qualify for voluntary physician-assisted suicide, but in the eyes of the non-terminal patients with no physical means to end their life, the ending of their pain through PAS may be worth their death; at what point is the medical staff disregarding a patient’s autonomy? Due to the variability of answers to these questions, the debate over physician-assisted suicide is far from over. However, real life occurrences happen every day outside the realm of debate and rhetoric, and decisions need to be made.

Although a patient’s choice of suicide symbolizes an expression of self-determination, there is a great distinction between denying life-sustaining treatments and demanding life-ending treatments. The right to self-determination is a right to allow or reject offered treatments, not to choose what should be offered. The right to refuse life-sustaining interventions does not correlate with a right to force others to hasten their death. The inability of physicians to inhibit death does not mean that physicians are allowed to help induce death.

Physician assisted suicide, the suicide of a patient suffering from an incurable disease, effected by the taking of lethal drugs provided by a doctor for this purpose. The question of whether or not this practice should be made legal in the United States has been one of controversy since 1997. Beginning with the case of Washington v. Glucksberg, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that the matter of the constitutionality of a right to a physician’s aid in dying, was best left up to the states. Then gaining even more controversy when Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, which allowed terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives by the practice of physician assisted suicide. (CNN.com) Proponents of physician assisted suicide

The topic that my group chose for the AP Capstone group project was Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, as we all thought that it would be a topic that would be interesting to write about. Additionally, my group was curious about the topic, and personally, I have aspirations to have some sort of career in the medical field one day. Another member in our group was very interested in law, and the other was curious about the topic, so we decided to go with the topic of physician assisted suicide and euthanasia. However, we originally thought that the group paper would be a very easy assignment as we, as a group had worked on other papers together before, but having our papers flow together and editing down repeated or unnecessary information was way harder than I