The Reaper's Assistant

The Reaper’s Assistant
Support for the participation of physicians in the suicides of terminally ill patients is increasing, and the actual effects on policies changing with regard to physician assisted suicide must be considered. Physician assisted suicide, or PAS, is when a physician provides the means for death, usually through a prescription; meaning that the patient, not the physician, will ultimately kill themselves. If PAS is legalized, physicians will need to gain expertise in understanding patients’ motivations for requesting PAS by assessing mental status, diagnosing and treating depression, maximizing sedative interventions, and evaluating the external pressures on the patient. The reasons against PAS include sanctity of life, negative impact on professional integrity, and potential abuse; PAS should not be tolerated within our society and it should be banned in all states.
Since PAS refers to the physician providing the means for death; the patient and not the physician will ultimately administer the lethal medication, it stands apart from the definition of euthanasia. Euthanasia generally means that the physician would act directly, for instance by giving a lethal injection to end the patient’s life. Some other practices that should be distinguished from PAS are terminal sedation, withholding or withdrawing life sustaining treatments, and pain medications that may speed up death.
PAS contradicts the primary and traditional duty of a physician which is to preserve life. If PAS were legal many ill patients would most likely select it rather than chose a complex and expensive care option. The sanctity of human life is violated when a physician is permitted to provide the means for a patient to kill them self. According to many religious and traditional beliefs, the act of taking another’s life is wrong; PAS is an active way of killing a person and it contradicts these values. Not only is PAS wrong in a religious manner but it is also an unnatural and unhealthy description of survival itself; a physician should help to maintain or improve life, not death. By physicians acting as a tour guide toward death he/she is implying the complete opposite of their primary job description which is to preserve life.
The professional integrity of a physician will not be maintained if PAS were to be legalized. Medicine’s ethical traditions strongly oppose the destruction of life and also major professional organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Geriatrics Society (AGS), oppose assisted suicide. If PAS were to be made legal and there were to be a mistake or uncertainty with a diagnosis or prognosis then physician would be liable; patients would have been misdiagnosed and killed due to an error. In order to avoid these unnecessary mistakes and to preserve physician’s integrity, it is important that PAS is not made legal and available to people.
There are some people who believe PAS should be legalized; they think that people should have the right to choose whether and when they want to die. Supporters argue that a patient should not be forced to continue living when there is no hope for recovery and they are experiencing intense pain; by implementing a law that allows PAS, it would reduce the pain of the patient and of their families. I think that by implementing such a law, it would be an open window for everyone who wants a “way out”. If a law that allows PAS to be freely administered to patients who “qualify” then the potential abuse of PAS would rise. People that lack access to effective care and support may choose to select the path of assisted suicide although an alternative option may exist. Families and patients may give in to death easily even though there is still a possibility toward recovery. In addition, insurance companies would most likely pressure and support doctors to encourage assisted suicide for certain cases to minimize costs. A doctor may also abuse PAS if legalized; he or she may advise a patient to consider it because they believe that the resources that would be spent on this patient could be better spent otherwise.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, and made a legal distinction between refusal of treatment and PAS. However, the Court also left the decision of whether to legalize PAS up to each individual state. In order for people to not fall into the pressure of selecting his or her death instead of fighting to stay alive, PAS should not be made legal; all states should keep PAS illegal.
PAS will ultimately persuade treatment refusal in many patients, there are risks of potential abuse, the physicians’ professional integrity will be at stake, and life itself should be protected. The arguments against PAS are substantial, and if it were to become part of standard medical practice in the United States the physician-patient relationship would fall apart. The meaning of health care would completely need re-wiring if PAS were to be implemented. PAS should not be made legal because it violates many values. The potential abuse of assisted suicide could force many patients to select death, when they lack a complete perspective of their outcome or they could possibly be making their decision based on false information.