The following Letter to the Editor was published on April 20, 2024 by The News Gazette.
As a physician, I would like to share my perspective on physician-assisted suicide.
While I agree with common concerns like abuse, misdiagnosis, medication issues and lack of safeguards, I want to focus on another aspect, especially from an emergency physician’s standpoint.
With over three decades of practicing emergency medicine, I have encountered numerous patients at the end of their lives. In emergency medicine, our aim is to cure whenever possible, but above all, to provide care. Sometimes, this entails accompanying patients and their loved ones on their journey towards the inevitable end of life.
Reflecting on physician-assisted suicide, it is impossible to ignore that facilitating a patient’s death contradicts the fundamental principles of medical care, upheld from antiquity to modern medical science. It is disconcerting to see physicians suggesting or providing a direct pathway to end a patient’s life, thus neglecting their duty of care, even towards those with terminal conditions.
Physicians advocating for physician-assisted suicide lack coherence in their justifications, citing reasons such as “dying with dignity” or alleviating suffering by ending life.
Instead of delving into comprehensive approaches to pain management, addressing social support deficiencies, or exploring the psychological, spiritual and emotional aspects of patients’ suffering, they advocate for the ultimate shortcut — facilitating death as the solution.
Redirecting resources from initiatives for physician-assisted suicide toward research for better end-of-life care, enhancing mental-health resources and optimizing pain management would better serve patients and society.
We must reconsider this tragic deviation from our responsibility as healers and stewards of health care.
Dr. GREGORY TUDOR
Peoria
3 comments:
Thank you Dr. Tudor for speaking for the fundamentals of the art and science of medical practice and the care of vulnerable people at the end of their earthly life’s journeys! I agree with your suggestion of redirecting resources for more research on the end of life care, pain management and mental health care. We should strive to be a society defined by how we care for the most vulnerable, not by eliminating them.
Sometimes the doctor's duty to care will include SHORTENING THE PROCESS OF DYING.
Isn't killing the opposite of healing? How many times are doctors WRONG about a diagnosis or how long the patient will live? Quite often in the case of cancer. My Oncologist, I suppose, should tell me I have cancer and ask me what day I want to schedule her treatment, death? Sounds counter to medicine where one tries to restore health and function to a person, to help them live with a purpose for as long as they wish. People can die from giving up, no matter what a doctor does, so they don't need the doctor to kill them, but to care for them.
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