Word: die
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because the practice has been carried out in private, the medical establishment has yet to develop a consensus on how and when to help a patient die. Until now, explains Leslie Pickering Francis, a professor of law at the University of Utah, "patients who are sophisticated enough to want the aid and physicians who are sympathetic enough to want to give it often do it in such a way that the intent and the knowledge are left deliberately ambiguous." Only a few, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian, have defied this conspiracy of silence...
...reason behind a terminal patient's death wish; so can unremitting, intense pain. Says Dr. William Wood, clinical director of the Winship Cancer Center at Emory University in Atlanta: "If we treat their depression and we treat their pain, I've never had a patient who wanted to die." Even those who believe assisted suicide is ethically sound agree that it should not be undertaken lightly. Benjamin, whose car sports a bumper sticker reading GOOD LIFE, GOOD DEATH, gets one or two requests a month for help in dying but talks most of his patients out of it. Says...
...patients make this decision for themselves." What doctors do need is a set of standards that make clear the role a physician should play in letting a patient go. How imminent should death be? How do physicians make sure a patient is mentally competent and really wants to die? What alternatives should be suggested? What sort of counseling is appropriate? The American Medical Association presently frowns upon doctors who participate in patient suicide. Now it has announced plans to revisit the matter. --Reported by Jenifer Mattos and Andrea Sachs/New York
After all, why did we need this ruling in the first place? In New York State, where this case was brought, not a single physician has been penalized for aiding a suicide since 1919. For 77 years, one can assume, some doctors have been quietly helping patients die. Why then the need for a legal ruling to make that official, a ruling that erases a fundamental ethical line and opens medical practice to unconscionable abuse...
...beguiling piece for us about a chess match between Garry Kasparov and a computer. This week, in his Viewpoint column, Krauthammer, who has a medical degree and is a board-certified psychiatrist, addresses a subject on which he's even more qualified: judicial rulings on the right to die. "Medical ethics is the one area of medicine I still follow," says Krauthammer, who warns against allowing doctors to kill terminally ill patients. "Once these lines are crossed, the other side is the abyss. Judges don't understand what they're doing in these kinds of cases...