A Report of Physicians' Beliefs about Physician-Assisted Suicide: A National Study.

A Report of Physicians' Beliefs about Physician-Assisted Suicide: A National Study. Yale J Biol Med. 2019 Dec;92(4):575-585 Authors: Hetzler PT, Nie J, Zhou A, Dugdale LS Abstract The goal of this work is to assess the beliefs of US physicians about the national legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS). We sent a survey to 1000 randomly chosen physicians from around the US. Our survey indicates that 60% of physicians thought PAS should be legal, and of that 60%, 13% answered "yes" when asked if they would perform the practice if it were legal. Next, 49% of physicians agreed that most patients who seek PAS do so because of pain, and 58% agreed that the current safeguards in place for PAS, in general, are adequate to protect patients. With respect to specific safeguards, 60% disagreed with the statement that physicians who are not psychiatrists are adequately trained to screen for depression in patients seeking PAS, and 60% disagreed with the idea that physicians can predict with certainty whether a patient seeking PAS has 6 months or less to live. Finally, about one-third (30%) of physicians thought that the legalization of PAS would lead to the legalization of euthanasia, and 46% agreed that insurance companies would preferentially cover PAS over possible life-saving treatments if PAS was legalized nationally. Our survey results suggest several conclusions about physicians' beliefs about PAS. The first is that there is a disc...
Source: The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine - Category: Universities & Medical Training Tags: Yale J Biol Med Source Type: research