Physician Assisted Suicide Analysis

Have you ever gone through agonizing pain and suffering before? Gone through hell hours? For days? Or even for weeks? Have you gone to the important decisions of telling your loved ones that you 've decided it’s your time already? A person who would even consider physician assisted suicide has gone through this for so long that they can not handle it anymore. This is something that the person themselves have to decide for themselves, after all it’s their body so they can choice what they want to do with it. However, the down side on Physician Assisted Suicide is that doctors are not adequately trained to perform it. This meaning maybe of easing the suffering and giving the patient a peaceful death, they are doing the complete opposite and prolonging life, while probably causing more suffering. At times physicians do tend to cause more suffering because their first role when they become physicians is to prolong life as much as possible. This however could be the reason that is causing the patient to suffer with all the medication that is given to them in order to live, when all along they just want to die. Another thing is that physicians take advantage of the Physician Assisted Suicide and abuse the power to perform it with a patient. This is stated in Dr. Marc Siegel’s statement “I am not in favor of this policy…because I question the role of a physician in facilitating this outcome.”( Siegel 821). However, most of the times, there have been times when physicians take charge and do physician assisted suicide without the patients consent. Assisted suicide wasn 't always around for the patients to consider, however it has recently become an issue. Physician Assisted Suicide has been an improvement because it gives the patients an opportunity to not just end their life but end their pain and their suffering when they choose to do so. However they have to meet specific guidelines in order to consider assisted suicide. This also complies with the physician’s role as well since their role is to ease the patients suffering. A physician has always had two roles, to both prolong life and ease the suffering of the patient. This happened because of situations similar to Dr. David J. Mayo. According to David J. Mayo, “My father, 93 and dying of colon cancer, remarked to the nurse enrolling him in hospice care that “the sooner this is over with, the better.”.”(qtd in Kariam 1). Physicians must do what ever is necessary to either prolong the patient’s life or to ease the suffering. In most cases, the lethal treatment that the physicians use is morphine because it eases the suffering and is slowing ending the patient’s life; however it’s with their …show more content…
If a physician’s first role, prolonging life, is causing the suffering, then they must do what it takes to ease their suffering because according to Barbara Huttman “He passed his bony fingers against my hand and muttered, “Thanks.” Then there was one soft sigh, and I felt his hands go cold in mine” (Huttman 187).. Now, if the patient comes to point where they are begging for the physician to end their life then the physician would have to bring in physician assisted suicide. That’s when the physician has to bring up assisted suicide as a consideration, because that would be the last resort if nothing else could help neither ease the pain nor prolong the patient’s life. This could relate to Huttman’s statement, “The desperation in his eyes and voice riddled me with guilt. “I’ll stop,” I told him as I injected him with the pain medication.”( Huttman 817). Physician’s usually grow a bond with the patient because in order to consider assisted suicide, the patient must have about six months to live until death therefore, when they beg to end their life, physicians do it with compassion because they could no longer see the patient suffering or begging. In retrospect, between Physician Assisted Suicide, physician should consider palliative care as a last resort in many cases. A reason where physicians comes to terms is the cost of the short term treatment is cheaper than the long term treatment. Something else is that the physicians want to lessen the suffering that their patients go