Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BENJAMIN WILL NEVER FORGET the first time he helped a patient commit suicide. It was more than a quarter-century ago. An elderly couple came to his office, husband and wife, both terminally ill and in terrible agony with cancer. "They told me they would like a supply of pills on hand just in case," recalls the 71-year-old New York City internist. The law forbade him to agree; his conscience dictated otherwise. In the end, his conscience won, but Benjamin had to wrestle with this ethical dilemma alone. At the time, doctors didn't even whisper among themselves...
Suddenly doctors are talking about little else. In a decision that took legal scholars and medical ethicists by surprise last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a New York State law that prohibited physicians from helping their patients die. It's already legal for doctors to withhold or withdraw treatment at a patient's request. Now, as long as a patient is in the final stages of a terminal disease, mentally competent and able to take a lethal dose of medicine on his or her own, the state can't bar a doctor from prescribing that dose...
...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...
This wide-open style of play should be in sharp contrast to the deliberate, patient style of the Harvard-Notre Dame game last weekend...
...They are patient in a much more aggressive way," Anderson added. "They...