Killing Patients.

     

         Euthanasia, assisted suicide, mercy killings are all euphemisms for killing patients.   Something that the long and noble history of medicine always eschewed.   Some are trying to change that commitment and that would be the greatest travesty in the history of medicine.
           Many doctors are absolutely opposed to killing patients under any circumstances. They entered medicine to save lives, to cure patients when they can and to ease suffering, but not by killing the patient, regardless of the circumstances and euthanasia is killing patients. I know all physicians do not share this view though according to the CMA  general council about seventy-three percent do, while others believe that they do have the right to end life under certain circumstances.  Nevertheless, when the President of the CMA and that organization, support a proposal that physicians who object to being involved with killing a patient (euphemistically renamed assisted suicide by the administridiots) ' can't just simply disregard the patient's right to access a service they're eligible for.' and must act against their ethics and the traditional principles of the medical profession, they are doing the profession that they claim to represent a great disservice.  In actual fact non-killing physicians are not interfering with the patient's rights if they make it clear that they do not believe that this treatment is in the best interests of the patient and therefore will not administer a harmful treatment; that is what a physician is supposed to do.   If the physician makes it clear from the outset that he does not prescribe this treatment  he has done his duty.   But let us not have administrators try to dictate morality.  It is not a doctor's duty to perform a treatment that  he/she is convinced is not in the patient's best interests.   If every patient is entitled to prescribe for themselves everything they think they're entitled to, we would have even more dying from oxycontin and fentanyl and other lethal drugs.  Being eligible for a service means being eligible for an appropriate service prescribed by a duly qualified physician. The responsibility of the Canadian Medical Association and of the Provincial licensing bodies is not to enforce behaviour that is repugnant and unethical to most physicians, regardless of the opinions of  the lawyers who make up the Supreme Court of Canada.  The administrators, both physicians and non physicians are accelerating the descent down  the slippery slope in this and many other ways.   Technology apart, medical care is becoming less caring and less humane.    The CMA and the Provincial Colleges are on the wrong path if they support coercing physicians to do things against their ethics and trying to mandate an obligation to kill patients or to help patients kill themselves. 
           The last group that attempted that were called Nazis and they succeeded in turning some physicians into monsters.     But they were just following orders.   Let us not make the same mistake.