Word: physician
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...fact that my 9 a.m. plans meant little to anyone else made them all the more special to me. Sarwer-Foner was going to be my third interviewee for my senior thesis—a relatively obscure physician for a relatively obscure topic: the history of insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia. If that doesn’t ring a bell, Russell Crowe convulsing violently through the window of Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital, as a pained Jennifer Connelly looks on, probably does. John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, received the now-defunct therapy for schizophrenia. (Incidentally, convulsions only occurred...
...known, is a psychiatric affliction and that mutilating the body to fit the afflicted psyche is to inflict a double injury on the patient. The area is gray enough, and the controversy serious enough, to leave the matter, as we have, to the conscience of the individual physician...
...ought never leave the decision to the individual physician when we come to the two redlines: no assistance in self-destruction (whether gradual or immediate) and no assistance in mutilation...
...That is all, however. Beyond that, the patient is sovereign and the physician's duty is to be the servant. Which is why the doctors in Singapore were right to try to separate the twins. They were not seeking self-destruction; they were seeking liberation. And they were trying to undo a form of mutilation imposed on them by nature. The extraordinary thing about their request was that it was so utterly ordinary. They were asking for nothing special, nothing superhuman, nothing radically enhancing of human nature. They were only seeking to satisfy the most simple and pedestrian of desires...
...those cases in which outside values trump the patient's expressed desire. The first is life. Even if the patient asks you to, you may not kill him. In some advanced precincts--Holland and Oregon, for example--this is thought to be a quaint idea, and the state permits physicians to perform "assisted suicide." That is a terrible mistake, for the state and for the physician. And not only because it embarks us on a slippery slope where putting people to death in the name of some higher humanity becomes progressively easier...