Assiswted Suicide

 

The devastating impact of physician-assisted suicide on the profession of medicine

By Dave Andrusko

Anthropologist Margaret Mead

Sometimes–actually often times–the very best analyses don’t offer a lot of new information. Rather they bring together in one place many ingredients that only those who follow an issue closely would know.

At least a dozen people emailed me a link to “A Doctor-Assisted Disaster for Medicine,” which appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

Dr. William L. Toffler is the national director of Physicians for Compassionate Care. With the wealth of experience that comes with being a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland and a licensed physician for 35 years, he begins by telling us how he has “seen firsthand how the law has changed the relationship between doctors and patients, some of whom now fear that they are being steered toward assisted suicide.”
It would be almost impossible to adequately unpack those 26 words, let alone the entire op-ed, in anything short of a book-length post. But think about this.
Patients must worry that physicians are no longer necessarily committed to “first do no harm” but to “first consider assisted suicide.”
It’s as if the physician’s black bag nowadays contains not only a stethoscope and a reflex hammer, but a needle and a prescription pad on which to write a lethal prescription.
So what? you might ask. I remember reading the following, gosh, maybe forty years ago. It was written by anthropologist Margaret Mead, explaining the almost incomparable significance of the Hippocratic Oath:

For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing. Throughout the primitive world, the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be the same person. He with the power to kill had power to cure, including specially the undoing of his own killing activities. He who had the power to cure would necessarily also be able to kill…With the Greeks the distinction was made clear. One profession, the followers of Asclepius, were to be dedicated completely to life under all circumstances, regardless of rank, age or intellect – the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor, the life of a foreign man, the life of a defective child…

Mead rightly observed of this “priceless possession” that

society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer – to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient…

It is the duty of society to protect the physician from such requests.
Dr. Toffler goes through the many holes in the safety net/”safeguards” that supposedly protect physicians from abusing their new found authority–and the patient from themselves, particularly when they are depressed.
I do want you to read the article in its entirety [www.wsj.com/articles/a-doctor-assisted-disaster-for-medicine-1439853118], so let me mention just one other of the many fine points Dr. Toffler makes.
“A shroud of secrecy envelops the practice of assisted suicide,” he writes.

Doctors engaging in it do not accurately report the actual manner of death. Instead they are required by state law to fabricate the death certificate, stating that the cause is “natural” rather than suicide. In late 1997, right before assisted suicide was about to begin, the state legislature implemented a system of two different death certificates—one that is public and includes no medical information and another that is kept private by the state. As a result, no one outside of the Oregon Health Division knows precisely how many assisted suicides have taken place, because accurately tracking them has been made impossible.

It is a conspiracy not just of secrecy but of a willingness to be a party to something that is transparently dangerous–indeed, infinitely dangerous: let’s pretend.
Do read, “A Doctor-Assisted Disaster for Medicine:
As a physician in Oregon, I have seen the dire effect of assisted-suicide laws on patients and my profession.”
Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, either go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha

Source: NRLC News