Word: physician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...your report on prostate cancer [MEDICINE, April 1]. Many think it is a disease of older men, but there has been a very rapid increase in prostate cancer in younger men. I was 48 when I asked for a diagnostic prostate-specific antigen test, even though my physician at the time did not recommend that I consider a PSA until I was 50. The tumor that was discovered was large and aggressive, but I am hopeful that my surgery was in time. Currently, researchers are looking mainly at older patients. We also need to focus more attention on the diagnosis...
...good argument for keeping the practice illegal? No, says Grossman: "It's incredibly arrogant to say nobody's going to be careful so we shouldn't let 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...
...course, the judges who plumbed the depths of the Constitution to find the "right" to physician-assisted suicide--a right unfindable for 200 years--deny the possibility of such a nightmare scenario. Psychological pressure on the elderly and infirm to take drugs to hasten death? Why, "there should be none," breezily decrees the Second Circuit Court of Appeals...
King Canute had a better grip on reality. This nightmare scenario is not a hypothesis; it has been tested in Holland and proved a fact. Holland is the only jurisdiction in the Western world that heretofore permitted physician-assisted suicide. The practice is now widespread (perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 cases a year; the U.S. equivalent would be 40,000 to 60,000) and abused. Indeed, legalization has resulted in so much abuse--not just psychological pressure but a shocking number of cases of out-and-out involuntary euthanasia, inconvenient and defenseless patients simply put to death without their...
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...