Why I ' m Bored With the Debate About Physician Assisted Suicide

by Drew Rosielle (@drosielle)I ’m a little bored of all the discussion about physician-assisted suicide. Mostly it’s because legalizing PAS is going to have zero impact on nearly all of my patients, and I think the significant amount of press and energy it gets is a distraction from other things which actually would improve t he lives (and deaths) of the patients and families I care for as a palliative doc.The last time I blogged about PAS waspart of my euphemisms series last year, when I elaborated why I did not like terms like ‘assisted death’ or ‘aid-in-dying’ and prefer ‘assisted suicide’ and ‘euthanasia’ (or ‘voluntary active euthanasia’ to be super-clear) instead. I appreciate that I am on the losing side of history here, people already are and are going to increasingly call PAS some variation of p hysician/medical - assisted/aid-in - death/dying but I’m still sticking with PAS for now. I’ll also note that the Canadians essentially proved my complaint correct last year, in that their Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) law includesboth PAS and euthanasia, underlining my point that the ‘assisted death’ locutions are imprecise and potentially confusing, and that ' PAiD ' is no simple replacement for the much clearer ' PAS ' .In the comments on my post last year someone intimated I must not support legalization of PAD and that ’s why I want to stick with the label “PAS.” Well, I don’t like PAD or PAS, but it’s also fair to say I hav...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: ethics euthanasia/suicide health policy rosielle Source Type: blogs