Death doctors use Covid-19 crisis to permit "aid-in-dying" via telehealth.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The assisted suicide lobby are actively promoting the approval of assisted suicide and euthanasia via telehealth. The death lobby are using the coronavirus to achieve two main goals, that being, allowing the approval of lethal prescriptions via telemedicine or telehealth and the expansion of assisted suicide to include euthanasia.

If allowed, a person could be prescribed lethal drugs for assisted suicide without ever being examined by a doctor.

According a committee of the newly formed American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying, (death doctors) (chaired by Lonny Shavelson, a California doctor who only offers death) the coronavirus crisis requires allowing approvals by telehealth. The committee stated:

In light of the coronavirus crisis, a committee has been convened to establish recommendations pertaining to the use of telemedicine to evaluate patients’ requests to consider medical aid in dying. (See below for members of the policy committee.)

For the purposes of this policy statement, “telemedicine” and/or “telehealth” refers to a visual and verbal patient contact by electronic means, without an in-person visit. 

Long before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many established aid-in-dying clinicians used telemedicine visits to evaluate select aspects of terminally ill patients’ requests to consider medical aid in dying. Given the need to limit in-person contacts to decrease the speed of contagion of coronavirus, an increased use of telemedicine for select aspects of aid-in-dying evaluations and care is recommended.

The committee of death doctors concluded:

The Committee concludes that there is nothing inherent in an aid-in-dying request that prohibits or discourages the use of telemedicine.

The death doctors are using the coronavirus to achieve their goal and they have no intention of going back to examining patients, once the coronavirus crisis passes. 

It is important to recognize the language used by the death doctors. "Medical Aid in Dying" (MAiD) is a term that is used by the death lobby for euthanasia and assisted suicide. The American death lobby are trying to extend assisted suicide legislation to include euthanasia or lethal injection. Most new assisted suicide bills are not what they appear to be.

Recently I reported that another death lobby group was using the coronavirus to promote assisted suicide via telehealth.

This is not a new plan. The 2019 New Mexico assisted suicide bill included a telehealth provision and a recent bill to expand assisted suicide in Hawaii includes a telehealth provision.State regulators should not take this group seriously. These are death doctors promoting more death. In the case of Shavelson, he does not provide medical treatment only death.

Training Doctors How to Assist Suicides

This article was published by National Review online on February 25, 2020

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

In California, a death doctor named Lonnie Shavelson is trying to start an assisted suicide specialty. From the Medscape story:

Organizers of the National Clinicians Conference on Medical Aid in Dying (NCCMAID) did not debate the appropriateness of the practice or focus on policy and ethics but rather sought to train and educate clinicians who are willing to participate. 

“The most imperative need is physician education and training,” said Lonny Shavelson, MD, board chair of the NCCMAID and founder of Bay Area End of Life Options. 

“The law makes no provision for medical training; there is no formal system, and I believe that is one of the major barriers and a shortcoming of the law in every state where it is legal,” he told the audience.

I know Shavelson. Before California legalized assisted suicide, he was a part-time ER doctor who mostly pursued photo journalism rather than practice medicine. These days, Shavelson devotes himself to death doctoring, for $2000 a pop (as of 2016).

As far as I know, Shavelson is not a certified medical expert in the long-term treatment of serious illnesses like cancer or in the provision of palliative care, hospice, etc.

He has long been a committed pro-assisted suicide ideologue. How committed? As he described in his 1995 book, A Chosen Death, Shavelson watched a Hemlock Society leader he called “Sarah” murder a disabled man named Gene who changed his mind about being assisted in suicide.

Shavelson was present in Gene’s home by invitation as Sarah hands Gene a poisonous brew she prepared, saying, “O.K., toots, here you go,” as if she had merely poured him a beer. Gene drank the liquid and began to fall asleep as Sarah put a plastic bag over his head.

But then, suddenly, faced with the prospect of immediate death, Gene screamed, “I’m cold!” and tried to rip the bag off his face. But Sarah wouldn’t allow it. From Shavelson’s account:

His good hand flew up to tear off the plastic bag. Sarah’ s hand caught Gene’s wrist and held it. His body thrust upwards. She pulled his arm away and lay across Gene’s shoulders. Sarah rocked back and forth, pinning him down, her fingers twisting the bag to seal it tight at his neck as she repeated, “the light, Gene, go toward the light.” Gene’s body pushed against Sarah’s. Then he stopped moving.

From what a reader can determine in his book, Shavelson never tried to stop Sarah and never reported the killing to the police. And we are supposed to trust such a man to become a leading medical figure in assisted suicide?

Also remember, Jack Kevorkian was a pathologist who never treated a living patient after medical school. Which brings up an old joke: What do you call the student who ranks last in medical school? Answer: “Doctor.”

Here’s the point: Doctors who assist suicides don’t need to be specially trained in treating a patient’s underlying medical condition. They don’t need to be experienced in spotting depression, signs of coercion, or mental illness. They don’t even have to be caring human beings.

They just need a license to prescribe lethal drugs and/or be otherwise be willing to help suicidal ill people take their own lives. What a disgrace to a venerable profession.

Doctors group pushes assisted suicide.

This article was published by OneNewsNow on July 30, 2019

A euthanasia expert is concerned about formation of a new doctor group's involvement in assisted suicide.

• Assisted suicide doctors to train more doctors to kill.

Doctors already participating in terminating people have formed the National Clinicians Conference on Medical Aid in Dying with a plan to teach more doctors and other medical professionals how to kill. It may also be used to recruit people to perform the task because of the shortage of doctors willing to do so.

Alex Schadenberg

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition points to Washington, D.C. which could only find two doctors willing to perform the work.

“But that shouldn't surprise anybody,” he says. “Doctors don't go into medical school because they want to learn how to kill people. It's usually because they have the intention of providing treatment and care for people.”

One concern about the new organization is that many doctors who joined are also involved in palliative care, which makes people comfortable until natural death. That is a concern, Schandenberg explains, because there are numerous complaints about abuse of medicine during palliative care.

“Obviously doctors who are willing to kill,” he warns, “are more likely to abuse the whole area of palliative care.”

The new group is headed by Lonny Shavelson, a doctor who has long been at the forefront of promoting assisted suicide.

Assisted suicide doctors to train more doctors to kill.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A new organization has been formed to promote assisted suicide within the medical community and provide training for physicians, and others, who are willing to kill.

According to the NCCMAID website, California assisted suicide doctor Lonny Shavelson, is the board chair with advisors and board members from across America.
 

Wesley Smith

In his article, The worst doctors can become death doctors, Wesley Smith stated about Shavelson:

When assisted suicide was legalized, he started “practicing medicine” again–as a death doctor, willing to help make people dead for $2000. 

Moreover, he has a deep ideological commitment to assisted suicide. How deep is it? He once watched a Hemlock Society leader murder a stroke victim who had asked to die but changed his mind. Instead, she holds a plastic bag over his head. From page 92 of Shavelson’s book: A Chosen Death:

The number of assisted suicide physicians, on the NCCMAID organization who list palliative care as their specialty, is concerning. The assisted suicide lobby is committed to normalizing assisted suicide as part of palliative care. It appears that NCCMAID is working on that goal.

EPC will continue to work with physicians to oppose assisted suicide. We are proud to have played a role in upholding the American Medical Association opposition to assisted suicide.

Special Report: A Scourge of Death Doctors.

This article was published by The American Spectator on January 30, 2019

Wesley J Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Jack Kevorkian has his unworthy successors.

Assisted suicide sure brings out the medical bottom feeders. Jack Kevorkian was the most notorious of these — let’s call them “death doctors” — assisting the suicides of some 130 people during the 1990s. Not only did he help sick, disabled, and (at least 5) healthy despairing people kill themselves, but he did it in a particularly crass fashion, such as having them inhale carbon monoxide from a canister in the back of his old, rusty van.

As a pathologist, Kevorkian did not treat living patients after medical school and was thus hardly qualified to medically counsel the many sad people who sought him out. (One wag, whose name escapes me now, quipped that Kevorkian was the most successful serial killer in history because victims came to him.) Nor was he primarily concerned with alleviating suffering. Rather, as described in his book Prescription Medicide, Kevorkian’s “ultimate aim” was a license to engage in human vivisection, i.e., “the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step [assisted suicide] can help establish.”

Jack Kevorkian

The point of his ghoulish desire was pure quackery:

[K]nowledge about the essence of human death will of necessity require insight into the nature of the unique awareness of consciousness that characterizes cognitive human life. That is possible only throughobitiatric research [Kevorkian’s name for experimenting on people being euthanized] on living human bodies, and most likely centering on the nervous system… on anesthetized subjects [to] pinpoint the exact onset of extinction of an unknown cognitive mechanism that energizes life.

Good grief.

Despite this — and more — Kevorkian became a media darling, supported by 60 Minutes— including the time he aired a video of himself murdering ALS patient Thomas Youk by lethal injection. (I can still see the late Mike Wallace asking repeatedly, “Is he dead yet? Is he dead yet?”) Kevorkian was also a special celebrity guest at Time magazine’s gala 50th anniversary party, where Tom Cruise ran up to shake his hand. At the end of his life, he received $50,000 per speech — not bad for a failed physician who couldn’t land a position at the end of his medical career.

The Australian doctor Philip Nitschke is another suicide-pushing ideologue par excellence. Not only has he held “how to kill yourself” training seminars around the world, but he was paid by the Hemlock Society (now, Compassion and Choices) to concoct a suicide brew made of common household products called the “Peaceful Pill.” In an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, Nitschke said that Peaceful Pills should be made available “in supermarkets” to “anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, the troubled teen.”

Philip Nitschke

Until Australia legally prohibited it, Nitschke sold plastic “Exit Bags,” to be put over one’s head while committing suicide. He was involved in several suicides of people who were far from seriously ill. One was cancer patient Nancy Crick, who made breathless news down-under when Nitschke announced at a news conference that he would counsel her on how to commit suicide. He claimed that Crick had terminal cancer. But when her autopsy showed no recurrence of the disease, Nitschke casually admitted he had known she wasn’t terminally ill all along.

Nitschke has also been implicated in the suicides of people who acted upon his advice to purchase an animal euthanasia drug with which to kill themselves. In his most recent death-promoting PR stunt — for which Newsweek praised him as the “Elon Musk of assisted suicide” — Nitschke conjured a futuristic-looking suicide machine that kills with liquid nitrogen and, he brags, can double as a sleek and luxurious casket.

The California physician Lonny Shavelson is the latest entrant in this infamous death doctor medical society. When California legalized assisted suicide, the formerly part-time emergency room doctor and photo journalist announced he was opening a suicide practice where he would confirm a terminal diagnosis and prescribe poison pills for just $2000.

Think about this: As an ER doc, Shavelson is not a trained specialist in treating cancer, ALS, kidney disease, or any of the many other conditions that can lead to a terminal diagnosis. Indeed, he might be incompetent in creating actual treatment plans for such patients or dealing with the myriad situations — including depression — that can arise in such serious circumstances. But as we saw with Kevorkian, death doctoring isn’t about providing proper care. Rather, its sole purpose is getting people dead.

One would hope that a doctor who deals in suicide pills would at the very least exhibit sterling character. Shavelson also fails that basic test. In A Chosen Death, he wrote about watching the leader of a local assisted suicide advocacy group murder a disabled man named Gene, a lonely alcoholic who was partially disabled by a stroke.

To fully understand Shavelson’s utter cravenness, permit me to describe the scene at some length. As Shavelson describes it, “Sarah” had previously assisted a close friend to commit suicide, telling the author that she found the experience tremendously satisfying and powerful, “the most intimate experience you can share with a person.… More than sex. More than birth… more than anything,” including being present for “the deliveries of my four grandchildren.”

A committed death fundamentalist, Sarah wants again to enjoy the intense rush she experienced facilitating her friend’s death, and so she jumps at the chance to help kill Gene when he contacts her for suicide assistance — which was a felony, by the way. He tells Shavelson, who asks to observe Gene’s death for recounting in his book.

Sarah comes to Gene’s home and prepares a poisonous brew, saying, “O.K., toots, here you go,” as if she were handing him a beer.Gene drinks the liquid and begins to fall asleep, with Sarah holding his head on her lap. She puts a plastic bag over his head. But then, suddenly, faced with the prospect of immediate death, Gene changes his mind. He screams, “I’m cold!” and tries to rip the bag off his face. But Sarah won’t allow it. From Shavelson’s account:

His good band flew up to tear off the plastic bag. Sarah’ s hand caught Gene’s wrist and held it. His body thrust upwards. She pulled his arm away and lay across Gene’s shoulders. Sarah rocked back and forth, pinning him down, her fingers twisting the bag to seal it tight at his neck as she repeated, “the light, Gene, go toward the light.” Gene’s body pushed against Sarah’s. Then be stopped moving.

There is a word that describes what happened to Gene: murder. The right, proper, ethical, and human thing for Shavelson to have done would have been to knock Sarah off the helpless man and then quickly dial 911 for an ambulance and the police. But Shavelson did nothing:

“Stop, Sarah” raced through my mind. For whose sake, I thought — Gene’s, so intent on killing himself? The weight of unanswered questions kept me glued to my corner. Was this a suicide, Gene’s right finally to succeed and die? Or was this a needless death encouraged by Sarah’s desire to act? Had Gene’s decision to have me there, to tell me his story, given me the right to stop what was happening — or, equally powerful, the responsibility not to interfere? Or was I obliged by my very presence as a fellow human being, to jump up and stop the craziness? Was it craziness?

Let me help: It was a cowardly abdication of responsibility by Shavelson and the abandonment of a weak and vulnerable man who fought the best he could to live. Adding to the intensity of the wrong, from what a reader can determine in his book, Shavelson never reported the killing to the police.

These days, Shavelson devotes himself to death doctoring, although I have little doubt that he will one day write a book about his suicide adventures. It is a cold business. From a recent story on assisted suicide in the Atlantic:

The patient takes the first drug, which Shavelson separates out from the rest of the mixture, and then Shavelson sits down at the bedside and reads aloud questions from the state’s required report. After about 30 minutes, he asks: “Are you ready to take the medications?” He mixes the drug cocktail and the patient drinks it.

“Usually, they go silent after taking the medication,” he says. “They’ve said what they’re going to say by that time.” For a few minutes, patients usually continue to sit silently, their eyes open. “And then, very, very slowly, they’ll close their eyes.”

Shavelson asks intermittently, “Are you still there?” At first, patients usually say yes, or nod. Within five or 10 minutes, they stop responding to the question. Then Shavelson will gently touch their eyelids. “When people aren’t deeply unconscious, they’ll sort of have a twitching response,” he explains. Within 10 or 15 minutes, the twitching response disappears, and patients enter a deep coma.

Using a heart monitor, Shavelson tells caregivers as a patient’s pulse slows and oxygen levels drop. “We wait a little while, and then I say, ‘Ah, the patient’s now dead.’”

Giving people poison to drink isn’t practicing medicine.

Death doctors don’t need to be good physicians. They don’t need to be specially trained in treating a patient’s underlying medical condition. They don’t need experience in spotting depression, signs of coercion, or mental illness. They don’t even have to be caring human beings. They just need a license to prescribe lethal drugs and/or be otherwise willing to help suicidal people take their own lives. What a disgrace to a venerable profession.

Award winning author Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council. His latest book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine.

Life Legal uncovers shocking facts about assisted suicide law

The following article was published by Life Legal Defense Foundation on June 22, 2018

In the course of challenging California’s End of Life Option Act, we have learned that a handful of doctors have written most of the prescriptions for lethal drugs since the law went into effect.

Life Legal attorneys have uncovered shocking facts about how California’s assisted suicide law is being implemented and who is doing the “assisting.”

One of those doctors is Lonny Shavelson, a former contract ER doctor who came out of retirement as soon as the law was passed to dispense lethal prescriptions. Shavelson is not board-certified in any medical specialty, including diagnosing or treating mental illness, which is often at the root of a request for suicide.

His sole “practice” consists of getting people to die.

Shavelson admits to having “attended at bedside” as 89 people committed suicide. He stresses that the lethal drugs must be taken within 2 minutes, or they can “fail.” By “fail,” he means the people don’t die—and may decide that they don’t want to kill themselves.

In his book “Chosen Death,” Shavelson writes about observing an assisted suicide. Gene, a lonely widower, contacted the Hemlock Society, which has since changed its name to “Compassion and Choices.” “Sarah” the head of the local Hemlock Society office, came to Gene’s home to prepare and dispense the deadly concotion. This was not Sarah’s first experience with “assisting” a person’s death. She called it “the most intimate experience you can share with a person. . . . More than sex. More than birth . . . more than anything.”

Sarah held Gene’s head on her lap as she gave him the suicide drugs. As he started to fall asleep, Sarah put a plastic bag over his head and told Gene to “Go to the light.”

But the drugs failed. Gene woke up and started screaming.

Shavelson describes what happened next:

“His good hand flew up to tear off the plastic bag. Sarah’s hand caught Gene’s wrist and held it. His body thrust upwards. She pulled his arm away and lay across Gene’s shoulders. Sarah rocked back and forth, pinning him down, her fingers twisting the bag to seal it tight at his neck as she repeated, ‘the light, Gene, go toward the light.’ Gene’s body pushed against Sarah’s. Then he stopped moving.”

As Wesley Smith writes, “There is a word that describes what happened to Gene, and that word is murder.”

There is no evidence that Shavelson ever reported the circumstances of Gene’s death to authorities.

Why would he?

Once a person requests assisted suicide, the law presumes that everyone—the doctor, the suicide facilitator, family members, hospital workers—is acting with the purest of intentions.

Here is how the law protects bad actors:

• Unlike other suicides, law enforcement will not investigate an assisted suicide to determine the cause of death or whether the person was coerced or forced—or if the person was murdered after he changed his mind, as Gene was.
• The underlying disease —not suicide—is listed as the cause of death, which means doctors and coroners have to lie on the person’s death certificate. 
• In fact, the law does not permit the use of the word suicide to describe the process of self-ingesting a lethal dose of barbiturates to end one’s life.
• If a doctor was negligent in making the initial diagnosis or prognosis, no one will know because all records will state that the person died of the alleged disease.
• An “interested” witness—someone who will benefit financially from the person’s death—can sign off on the suicide drug request.
• A family member can initiate the request for assisted suicide—Shavelson says that most of the calls to his suicide clinic come from family members, not from the person seeking suicide.
• Any doctor or osteopath can write the prescription. No prior doctor-patient relationship with the person seeking suicide drugs is required.
• No mental health evaluation is required, even though the majority of people who receive a terminal diagnosis suffer from depression.
• Someone else can pick up the lethal drugs from the pharmacy.

In short, assisted suicide laws are designed to facilitate the perfect crime.

So how does this affect me?

You might wonder how this affects you or your loved ones since you would never seek assisted suicide.

Proponents of assisted suicide want to normalize suicide as THE end-of-life option. It is not an accident that California’s law is called the End of Life Option—not options—Act.

Shavelson’s goal is for hospice to “take over” assisted suicide. Compassion and Choices—the former Hemlock Society now heavily funded by George Soros—wants to “change the health care system” so that suicide is legalized nationwide. Faye Girsh, Senior Adviser at the Final Exit Network, says it should “be a crime” to not allow someone to kill themselves. Dr. Philip Nitschke, Director and Founder of Exit International, says “people have a right to dispose of [their] life whenever they want.”

Former Compassion and Choices litigator and head of the End of Life Liberty Project Kathryn Tucker says “it would be appropriate for the practice to become more normalized within the practice of medicine, with less government oversight and regulation.”

Life Legal regularly handles cases involving the denial or withdrawal of life-sustaining medical care without the patient’s consent. People are starved and dehydrated to death against their will because it has become “normalized within the practice of medicine” to deprive people of basic care.

I shudder to imagine what full-scale normalization of assisted suicide would look like.

What we do know already is that normalizing suicide means:

• Insurance providers will happily cover the cost of a deadly dose of barbiturates to avoid having to pay for actual medical care and treatment.
• Some doctors will simply write a prescription for lethal drugs instead of encouraging patients to seek a second opinion for potentially treatable diseases.
• A new industry is being created that allows doctors who do not offer any medical care or treatment to charge patients exorbitant fees in exchange for a prescription for lethal drugs.

We are following in the path of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, where the normalization of assisted suicide quickly led to voluntary—and involuntary—euthanasia.

The worst doctors can become death doctors.

The article was published by Wesley Smith on his blog on August 6, 2017.

Wesley J Smith

By Wesley J Smith

The New York Times is on an assisted suicide/euthanasia promotion juggernaut. Recently, it had a magazine-length, front page story swooning story about a euthanasia party in Canada. 

Today, a major front-page opinion section column by a doctor supporting assisted suicide–but hand-wringing about it being done carefully. First, Jessica Nutik Zitter admits she might have assisted the suicide of a patient whose motive for wanting to die now was resentment and a feeling of abandonment from his sister. From, “Should I Help My Patients Die?“: 

His despair had given way to rage. “Let’s just end this,” he said. “I’m fed up with my lousy life.” He really didn’t care, he added, that his sister opposed his decision. His request appeared to stem from a deep family wound, not his terminal illness… 

At our second meeting, with more trust established, he issued a sob, almost a keening. He felt terrified and powerless, he said. He didn’t want to live this way anymore. I understood. I could imagine my own distress in his condition — being shuttled like a bag of bones between the nursing home and the hospital. It was his legal right to request this intervention from me. But given how uncomfortable I was feeling, was it my right to say no? 

It seems to me it was her duty to say no–just as she would if the patient didn’t have a terminal illness. 

Indeed, as a palliative care doctor, she should declare her practice an assisted suicide free zone to make sure there is never any public confusion between pain and symptom control and intentionally participating in suicide. 

Also notice the man’s intent to commit suicide was not due to physical suffering caused by the disease. Indeed, actual suffering–much less suffering that can’t be alleviated–isn’t required by assisted any suicide laws either. One just needs the terminal diagnosis–sometimes mistaken–to qualify for the lethal pills. Actual suffering has nothing to do with it. 

This was Zitter’s first time being asked to assist suicide, and she was troubled. (Good for her. She should have been.) So, she made a deal with the patient to go on four weeks of anti-depressants. He later changed his mind and he died naturally three months later. 

But note: She could have lethally prescribed. Some doctors–particularly those ideologically predisposed to assisted suicide–would have. 

And the patient might not have lived long enough to change his mind. Even Zitter implies she would have-despite her knowledge of his reasons–had he made another request in four weeks after taking the anti-depressants. 

I know some readers will choose to miss the point and say this story shows the law working because the man didn’t kill himself. 

But there will be others who will kill themselves before sufficient time passes to change their minds–and we will never know who they are because they will be dead. 

Indeed, I have met several people who would have killed themselves if assisted suicide were legal but were so glad it wasn’t because they eventually changed their minds. 

But note, Zitter then points to Lonnie Shavelson as the epitome of committed death doctors that society should trust to do assisted suicide right. 

She describes Shavelson as an emergency room and primary care doctor. That overstates his credentials. For most of his medical career, Shavelson was a part time, contract ER doc. He also did some health clinic work for poor immigrants. 

But he is not a board certified specialist in providing ongoing care for cancer patients, kidney disease patients, diabetics, or indeed, other serious conditions. Indeed, until California legalized assisted suicide, he was mostly out of medicine, pursuing a career as a photo journalist and author. He certainly isn’t a specialist in caring for dying patients. He’s no hospice doc.  

When assisted suicide was legalized, he started “practicing medicine” again–as a death doctor, willing to help make people dead for $2000. Moreover, he has a deep ideological commitment to assisted suicide. How deep is it? He once watched a Hemlock Society leader murder a stroke victim who had asked to die but changed his mind. Instead, she holds a plastic bag over his head. From page 92 of Shavelson’s book: A Chosen Death: