Euthanasia again!

Euthanasia – again!

   At last a group of physicians have the guts to take an honest and realistic look at a situation that the supreme court judges, their legal confreres and an army of administridiots can’t even imagine realistically.   Representatives of that group, appropriately anesthesiologists, wrote extensively on the topic in last month’s Canadian Journal of Anesthesia.  They have re-iterated what I have frequently written, that the task of terminating people would be much more appropriately assigned to a group other than physicians whose purpose has been to ‘preserve life and relieve suffering’ when a cure is not available.   They suggest that this function should be left to some other group than physicians and suggest the name ‘euthanists’.  I have suggested the name ‘terminators’, but perhaps that is a little to close to the bone!

   The Government has until June to establish the legal infrastructure the will be implemented for what now is being described as ‘assisted dying’.  (As though we need the government to assist us in dying’!)    Note that the word suicide is being relegated into the shadows - a typical Orwellian tactic to mould the folks thinking.  The judges sitting on their benches have no idea and don’t seem to care how the ‘terminators’ will arrive at their conclusions.  During fifty years of medical practice, I have had a significant number of patients who would have opted for termination had it been available, who subsequently went on to live a meaningful and fulfilling life.  Psychiatrists, as well as other physicians can be as inaccurate as meteorologists in their prognostications.  That is why the ethos of medicine has been firmly based on the conservation of life.  Change that and it changes the very nature of medicine.  In fact it completes the transformation of medicine from a humanitarian profession centred on the physician-patient relationship, to the health care industry, subservient to politician and their janissaries. 

   It will only take one generation for ‘assisted death’ to become an accepted policy of state.
Comment if you have any views on this.