California recently legalized physician-assisted suicide and, no doubt, other states will soon follow their lead. While this may alleviate patient suffering, are we really at the stage where we allow physicians to help patients commit suicide? In fact, only 52% of doctors polled on SERMO (the largest social network exclusive to doctors) believe it should be legal.
We missed an important step: palliative and end-of-life care. The healthcare community has done a poor job here and perhaps this should be addressed first. Many health care dollars are spent on medical care during a patient’s final moments of life. Much of this is just to keep patients alive without any real quality of life. Physicians, in collaboration with patients and their families, need to be allowed to say enough! We generally know when heroic medical measures are going to fail and we are merely sustaining life. In order to reduce healthcare costs, the system needs to stop providing useless care.
Additionally, we need to improve on palliative care. If a patient is suffering, we need to be able to alleviate it. There may be no cure available, but this doesn’t mean we should give up on making the patient comfortable. Alleviating pain should be one of our biggest goals. If we are able to do that effectively, maybe our patients wouldn’t necessarily feel they need us to help them take an early exit. Maybe, despite the fact that a life may be near the end, we can add some value back into those last days. We should not be legalizing physician-assisted suicide until we optimized the whole field of palliative care and end-of-life medicine.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
There is a great danger in allowing the hands trained to cure and save lives to also end lives in their care. It is very easy to see how the line between saving and killing can get blurred. We spent years training and learning to be able to save lives and make people healthy. No training was provided on how to assist in taking a life. And doctors should not be given the green light to start without adequate training. Life is valuable and sacred. These decisions need the utmost knowledge about how to be done and when.
Should physician-assisted suicide be legal? Perhaps only in extreme cases. But, for now, until we improve on providing care to these suffering patients, it is imperative that the whole system work to achieve better palliative medicine. And, we need to know when to implement it. We are failing on a large-scale in this regards. It seems that by allowing physician-assisted suicide, we have missed this major step.
Another important factor to keep in mind is that a patient with a terminal disease often suffers depression as well. We do not help depressed patients take their lives. Where do we distinguish whether a patient wants to commit suicide because of their medical illness or because of their depression? Does it make a difference? And if not, are we going to help patients merely suffering depression carry out their suicide wishes? There is no diagnostic test to determine this. There is no way to measure or quantify it. We need better tools in place before we start this process. Otherwise, we are bound to make a mistake, and 1 human life taken in error is too high a price to pay for pushing out legislation without fully taking all steps to avoid poor care.
