Euthanasia

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Anyone who takes their own life should be punished to the full extent of the law!

Yes why I'm so proud of Being Swiss yeah Dignatas ! 1 st that and than they humble Oprah (she needed it )

why is it ok to kill animals with out their permission (and if we understood pig you can be certain they would say "nein" to that ) for gluttony yet a sane person in pain can't end his or her life ?

Entrenched beliefs die hard. But I can see euthanasia being legalised in more places in the near future, particularly as religious influence in government and social debates continues to diminish.

BTW, what did Oprah (Winfrey?) do to deserve humbling? Did she pay a visit to Dignitas?

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sorry it was in Zurich and it was a $50, 000 bag and the shop owner didn't know who she was and Oprah was "mad" she did not get the treatment she felt she deserved , long story short racism she screams bit rich when they have nearly 2 X the foreign born population as the usa it's similar to Australia , good god I wish the Americans would end that chestnut that their "multicultural" compared to where Japan?

Oprah was being a media whore as all ways

Oh well, as least she wasn't being suicidal. I was kinda worried. I looked up the handbag incident on Google: seems like a stupid misunderstanding. "Racism" seemed a bit presumptuous, though. And the US is multicultural; so is Switzerland, Australia and the UK, among other places.

On the euthanasia front, four states in the US already permit assisted suicide (Washington, Oregon, Montana and Vermont), although none permit euthanasia itself. New Zealand looks set to introduce and debate euthanasia legislation next year after its general election. I hope it passes, whenever it comes up. Australia, well ...

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give it 30 - 40 years

I thought the usa was around 13 % Oz and Swiss nearly 25%

At those levels it's = to Germany or France and few say those place are "multicultural"

Sorry if it sounds in your face but life has taught me there is no limit to 'suffering' especially when it comes to the mental kind. Now anyone that proclaims different just hasn't suffered enough
I would like to be able to arrange it that over the next 20 years or so , I'm late forties, to declare on a yearly basis my wish to be euthanised be it with a sollicitor or whatever.
So when the day comes that I will be a dribbling, incontinent, semi-mobile creature I can say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, and having made my wishes very clear for a considerable time I should be allowed to leave on my terms.
But I suppose that is too much to ask

There are at least three different aspects to this end of life question, and they all have different ethical challenges.

1) Suicide. This one seems pretty straightforward--if a patient can obtain the means to hasten their own death, then the patient can take conscious, independent and deliberate steps to do that. But the question arises does anyone have an obligation to stand in their way? Suppose I have a terminally ill patient, who is in pain. What steps am I required to take before I can prescribe a morphine pump?

2) Assisted suicide. At this level, we are not dealing with a patient who has acquired the means to commit suicide, but rather, the health care system actively provides the patient with those means. Is it ethical for me to respond to a clear, unequivocal and rational request from a patient for a lethal dose of medication, with a prescription for the same? Even if I will have no part in its administration, I am nonetheless implicated because I am a causa sine qua non in the chain of events leading to death.

3) Euthanasia. Here we have the most troublesome level. Here we have physicians being called upon to actively administer a lethal treatment in response to a patient request. Even more troublesome can be the administration of lethal treatment in response to a prior request that the patient is no longer in a position to contradict. The ethical issues become insurmountable, in my view.

I have absolutely no ethical qualms about DNR, and withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. Letting nature take its course is an easy choice. But once we start climbing the ladder of hastening death, I very quickly get into territory where I am not at all happy to be navigating.

And those who survive a suicide attempt should be sentenced to death.

Sorry for the levity; I know how emotionally and morally exhausting this topic can be. My mother asked me to "help her along" when she was living in agony, dying from terminal cancer, nothing more than a skin covered skeleton. I was unable to oblige but have carried that cross ever since... you help or you don't, either way the one doing or not doing the helping takes a hard hit.

Thanks for breaking down things this way.
Suicide: I believe every person has a right of self-ownership, and that includes a right over their own life. My qualms about it are whether it is right to forcefully keep someone from committing suicide when it is suspected that person is temporalily not sound of mind, and how can I assess that in the first place.

Assisted suicide: I assume they would do it themselves if they could. In the case of someone terminally ill and in pain, helping them along is the more merciful choice to me.

Why is being an indispensable cause a cause of concern? Possible legal implications? Moral issues regarding being instrumental to another person's death where your decision to help or not directly affects the outcome?

Euthanasia: Not too long ago I thought euthanasia and assisted suicide were the same thing, differentiating between them is certainly useful. If it is someone's will to die, I believe it is ultimately not that important whether they do it themselves or have someone else do it for them. I can't see many cases other than absolute paralysis or similar where someone with enough awareness and faculties to request euthanasia wouldn't be able to do an assisted suicide instead.


I still think this one should be allowed, provided there is evidence of such a prior request. The three cases I've thought the most about, related to this kind of euthanasia, are brain death, dementia and being in a coma. For brain death, can that person even be considered alive in the first place? If they are, doesn't that conflict with the practice of organ donation? Dementia is trickier. My father has told our family that if he ever has Alzheimer he'd like to be euthanized instead of reaching the latter stages. And I believe similarly, I wouldn't like to live as a husk of my fomer self. There is the question of whether I have now the right to choose for that future version of me, which is a big issue on its own, but to cut it short I feel like I do have that right. All in all, if I ever had Alzheimer's I'd end things myself before I lost the mental faculties to do so, but I'm still a long way from taking that kind of decisions, anyway. Being in a coma is the trickier one; the previous two have in common that things can only get worse from there, while there is actually a chance that someone in a coma will go out of it. I'm not sure what to think about that one

The case where there is no record of a patient's request from euthanasia is in too much of an slippery slope and too prone to abuse for me to be comfortable with it (except perhaps brain-death, again it brings up the question of whether they are alive in the first place)

My father faced the same thing. My grandfather (after having been slowly dying, in constant pain for months, and slipping in and out of consciousness due to massive doses of - sometimes ineffective - analgesic drugs) asked my father for euthanasia. Obviously, neither my father nor the medical staff could comply. And the doctors were actually seriously suggesting surgery to deal with his stomach cancer.

He was 94 years old, his agony was causing both my grandmother, my father and my aunt to break down crying, he obviously didn't want to live and he was severely emaciated to the point where he was barely recognisable. And they considered surgery, but not euthanasia? While everyone else in my family was crying, I was *furious*... I lost a little bit of faith in humanity on that day...

Anyway... he died a few hours later, likely due to an "accidental" overdose of analgesics.

My mother had become bedridden for several months. Double incontinent, vomiting all the time and unable to walk. She looked exactly like those people you see in photographs of Jews liberated from WW2 concentration camps. A few days after my mothers request a McMillan nurse came to stay with her overnight. She died a couple of days while the nurse stayed. My father and I were very suspicious that the nurse had overdosed my mother to release her. Personally I was relieved but my father was angry about it. There was no autopsy - apparently there never is when a person is terminally ill as the cause of death is assumed. I was just glad it was all over. Six months of hell for my mother and similar for the rest of us.

To my way of thinking (and this is a personal ethical view, I don't pretend to speak for the whole medical profession), being a causa sine qua non makes me equally responsible for the death of the individual, as the person who actually administers (or self-administers) the drug. One of my responsibilities as a physician is to be mindful of the potential abuse of medications that I prescribe to my patients. Where I know that a potentially lethal dose is going to be used for precisely that purpose, I do not believe that I can shield my participation behind the fact that the drug is being administered by another person.

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