Fear of imposed death by hospitals

In the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal, reports circulate regularly about elderly people refusing to go to the hospital for fear that a physician will deem their life unworthy. The “right to die” quite easily becomes the “obligation to die” once physicians start becoming judge and executor.

James A. Avery, MD, The Daily Progress. 

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http://www.dailyprogress.com/starexponent/opinion/reader-s-views-physician-assisted-suicide-is-a-bad-idea/article_b7904700-a6fc-11e4-9979-f3c89d8d588b.html

READER'S VIEWS: Physician-assisted suicide is a bad idea

Posted: Thursday, January 29, 2015 12:00 am

READER'S VIEWS: Physician-assisted suicide is a bad idea James A. Avery, MD The Daily Progress

In the dark ages of medicine, physicians routinely ended the life of their patients. However, since the time of Hippocrates ­ 2500 years ago, physicians have promised their patients that they will not intentionally terminate a life.

When, as he wrote in the Decorum, “patients become overmastered by their disease,” physicians agreed to not hasten or prolong death. “Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always” was the basic strategy. Of course, since that earlier time and, up to today, physicians have always been tempted to help desperate and despondent patients kill themselves. Time and time again, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide causes were championed – only to be ultimately rejected by the medical profession and almost all cultures.

G. K. Chesterton once said, “Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” Since the time of Hippocrates, medicine has made huge advances in our ability to control and manage pain. So, I ask, why has there been a recent effort to take down this fence?

Certainly, the recent highly publicized case of Brittany Maynard, a winsome and attractive 29 year-old newlywed, has renewed the old tiresome arguments. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, Brittany moved from California, where she was born and raised, to Oregon where right-to-die laws are legal. On November 1, 2014, physicians prescribed a massive dose of life-ending barbiturates so Brittany could kill herself before many of the symptoms she feared and imagined could develop. It’s a sad and tragic story but the conclusion that suicide was the compassionate solution was even sadder.

As a board-certified hospice physician, I have personally taken care of many young people with brain tumors. I have found that once the hospice team addresses their suffering in all dimensions – physical, emotional, social, and spiritual – and reassures them about the future, anxieties are reduced and a peaceful death is the norm.

There are many reasons why I oppose physician-assisted suicide but let me focus on one of them here: it will change the medical profession in a dramatic and negative way. I don’t believe it is commonly known by most people that physicians in almost all countries are forbidden from participating in capital punishment. And, when physicians are inducted into the military, they do not bear arms. There are fundamental reasons for this and these go to the heart and soul of medicine: physicians heal and comfort – they do not kill.

In the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal, reports circulate regularly about elderly people refusing to go to the hospital for fear that a physician will deem their life unworthy. The “right to die” quite easily becomes the “obligation to die” once physicians start becoming judge and executor.

Patients want their physicians to care for them without pondering and considering whether “they are worth the effort”. Taking care of seriously ill and dying patients is hard work - just ask any physician who does hospice or palliative medicine. “Assisted suicide is the easy way out for doctors,” said Johns Hopkins physician, Paul McHugh, “physician-assisted suicide tears down the time-honored barrier protecting patients from physician mischief.” Patients want a caring physician who tries his best to cure, comfort always, reassure them when they are despondent, honor reasonable wishes, and labor for their good.

So … back to our original question: was poisoning Brittany the best response a physician can offer a sad, desperate, and frightened young girl? I, like almost all physicians for the last 2500 years, emphatically say “no.”

Thirty-seven years ago, I entered medical school with the goal of reducing human suffering; the years have taught me that the physician-assisted suicide is not the answer for compassionate end of life care. The answer, in my view, is skilled compassionate hospice care.

James A. Avery, MD is the CEO of Hospice of the Piedmont.

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Brain Dead or Heart Dead

In Jahi McMath's case her treatment was withheld because, in effect, someone decided she was not “there” anymore. This is otherwise known as the legal fiction of “brain death.” One must ask the obvious question, as did the astute physician Dr. Paul Byrne: if the brain were truly “dead” as was alleged, what force then caused the heart to still beat?

I suspect for heart transplants you need a beating heart else the heart organ would be dead and not transferable.  So, a donor must be brain dead but still alive. (my conclusion)

http://lifelegalguardians.org

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Assisted Suicide legislation a slippery slope

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/scotland/assisted-suicide-plans-naive-1.803459

Assisted suicide plans 'naive'

By PRESS ASSOCIATION, 23 January 2015 6.46pm. Updated: 24 January 2015 12:13pm.

The Courier

Elderly parents could be encouraged to kill themselves by their children to prevent costly care bills eating into their inheritance if assisted suicide is legalised, MSPs have been warned.

Proposals to allow sick people - including teenagers as young as 16 and elderly people - to seek help to end their own lives have been attacked by palliative care experts and religious groups.

The Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill is "dangerously naive" and so vague it could legalise assisted suicide by loaded gun, experts said in submissions to Holyrood's Health Committee.

Dr Stephen Hutchison, consultant physician in palliative medicine at the Highland Hospice in Inverness, said: "In the UK, elder abuse affects over half a million people, with the perpetrators commonly being friends or family.

"In the face of chronic illness and dependence, and the prospect of expensive care eroding the family's inheritance, the availability of assisted suicide could create further risk to the frail and elderly and expose them to unhealthy societal and internal pressures."

International evidence suggests the legalisation of assisted suicide could be the start of a "slippery slope" to a wider acceptance of suicide for non-life limiting conditions, he added.

He said: "The relaxation of criteria and disregard for the law as seen elsewhere is almost certain to be replicated here if assisted suicide was to be legalised. To argue otherwise is dangerously naive."

In Belgium, a transsexual was euthanised following a failed sex change, deaf twins ended their lives because they feared going blind, while a women with depression and another woman with anorexia died by euthanasia, he said.

An elderly Italian lady received assisted suicide in Switzerland "because she was distressed about losing her looks", and another sought death "because she felt unable to adjust to the modern world", he said.

One doctor in Oregon "encouraged a sick man to have assisted suicide, much to the alarm of his wife" but he went on to live a further five years, he said.

Professor Marie Fallon and Dr David Jeffrey said the Bill "represents a paradigm shift in medical ethics which will have a damaging effect on the doctor-patient relationship".

They said: "The Bill is alarmingly vague as to the means of suicide. As it stands, could it include supplying the patient with a loaded gun?"

The Muslim Council of Scotland said: "Evidence shows that wherever assisted suicide is legalised, it inevitably leads to increasingly more people becoming eligible to end their lives prematurely, the recent example of Belgium's extension of euthanasia to children confirming that in this area the slippery slope is real."

The Children's Hospice Association said: "For neuro-developmental reasons, young people up to the age of about 25 years old do not fully associate their own death with permanent erasure from existence.

"This is extremely important because it means a young person might ask for assisted suicide for reasons that have nothing to do with an actual desire to die in the sense that death is understood by older adults."

The experts will give evidence to the Health Committee on Tuesday.y PRESS ASSOCIATION, 23 January 2015 6.46pm. Updated: 24 January 2015 12:13pm.

Children who want to hasten death of relative for money

Two examples are explained by Jim Shockley, probate lawyer.  It is worth the time to watch.

See Jim Shockley, MTSS against Euthanasia, You Tube 4.49 minutes.

re dangers of a living will (advance directive)
re undue influence
re morphine to hasten death

Grief

Grief is not easy.  It can throw our lives into anguish and upheaval, and we are left wondering how to deal with it.

It takes time and a thousand tears to accept the death of someone you love . . . you may receive great comfort from people who have been in the place of sadness where you are now.  In our sorrow, we are all connected.

Susan Florence

Slippery, slippery, slippery

Canadian Proposal Would Allow Doctors to Euthanize Mentally Disabled Patients

by Wesley J. Smith | Ottawa, Canada | LifeNews.com | 1/16/15 11:05 AM

In the 1990s by the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide is not a constitutional right. But the Court has again taken up the issue–and hence, I suspect the handwriting is on the wall.
That seems so clear that culture of death advocates are already making serious proposals to determine the look of the beast that seems to be a-aborning. University of Victoria bioethicist Eike-Henner W. Kluge has made news with a “Legislative Proposal” that would:
1. Establish euthanasia death courts–also being proposed in the UK–in a country that doesn’t permit capital punishment;
2. Allow a broad license to be euthanized based on almost wholly subjective criteria;
3. Allow the courts to order the incompetent to be euthanized.
Here are a few specifics. First, the right to be killed would be totally subjective, based on “values” of the person wanting to die:

If a person suffers from an incurable and irremediable disease or medical condition, and if that person experiences the disease or condition as violating the fundamental values of that person.

Good grief, that could mean anything beyond the transitory.
There would be Death Courts:

that person may make application to a superior court for permission to request the assistance of a physician in terminating his life as quickly and as painlessly as possible in keeping with the fundamental values of that person;

Can you imagine who would teach the judges about how to decide these issues? It wouldn’t be professors or “experts” who believe in the sanctity/equality of human life or the Hippocratic Oath!
At least the suicidal patient has to be “competent.” But wait! The incompetent could be killed too:

Any person who suffers from an incurable and irremediable disease or medical condition, and who, by reason of incompetence, is unable to make application to a court as allowed under sec. yyy.1, may have such application made for him by a duly empowered proxy decision-maker using appropriate standards of proxy decision-making.

People who were never competent could be killed, by the way. What could go wrong?
Maybe I missed it, but there are no conscience exemptions provided for doctors–or for that matter, judges.
Also note: The killing would be paid for by the government as Canada as a single payer health care system.

Please don’t say that Canada would never adopt a killing regime so unconstrained as Kluge’s proposal. Quebec’s new law is almost as radical.
At the very least can we finally acknowledge that this issue is not about terminal illness?
Of course we can’t. We live in culture that shelters from reality through the intentional embrace of pretense.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism. 
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This is what they were doing to Randy.  He was declared incompetent in February 2014 by Dr. Dunne, a doctor who Randy did not want, and although I was Randy's representative, I was not told.  At the same time they were making a subjective case against me for being incompetent as well. How could they do this without even talking to or notifying me. We do not have to wait for legislation it is already here. They wanted him to agree to a DNR Order thus the next time he got pneumonia his heart rate would exceed what is normal and he would die. I am not even talking about assisted suicide, I am talking DNRs.
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Supply creates Demand

We demand, and death is obtained not because we suffer, but because we are afraid at the thought of suffering ... 

The countries that are questioning possible legalization should be aware that supply creates demand. 

When euthanasia was authorized twelve years ago in Belgium, it was presented as an ethical transgression, an exception reserved for extreme situations. Twelve years later, its scope has expanded considerably.

Etienne Montero
author of Appointment with Death