Question

This chapter touches on complex and often painful issues. Given the current thinking, how can a physician decide what is the ethical thing to do when asked about assisted suicide? How can the physician respect the patient's wishes and still maintain an ethical practice of medicine?

Answer 1

Generally in assisted suicide or euthanasia the healthcare professionals at various levels (clinical level or management level or both) will face ethical issues at healthcare institutions. In healthcare ethical issues dealing are not uncommon. Physician assisted death is defined as “suicide by a patient facilitated by drug prescription or by an indication of a lethal dosage provided by a physician aware of the patient's intent. For taking each and every ethical decision can make an ethical implications and this kind of decisions can affect patients, healthcare leaders and providers. It is because the life is a precious gift given by God with gratitude. So we should give vale and take concern about every possible way to enhance. But in the process of assisted suicide before exhausting a person making every preventive effort is always inevitable. We should make it legally possible for the compassionate to show clemency to the dying who request intervention to end their suffering. Physicians cannot be prosecuted for prescribing medications to hasten death. For physician assisted death Individuals must have a terminal illness as well as a prognosis of six months or less to live.

The physician moral integrity and basic role can clearly define the professional integrity and also medical practitioners are additionally considering three important further moral commitments. These are known as autonomy the patient’s right to choose their treatment, non-maleficence, and the final moral commitment is justice, ensuring the provision of fair and equal treatment for all patients. Morrison & Furlong (2014) states that understanding the professional integrity can includes with the relief of suffering and always give respect to patient voluntary choice. Finally allow patients to achieve his peaceful death. In extremely cases, doctors might feel fewer obligations to give the best care for the patient if physician could decide death as solution to the agonies of life. It is still a controversy issue.

The law permit individuals to choose their own personal definitions of death because, it gives the right to choose the amount of suffering an individual has to bear in his own hands, provided the clauses mentioned above are fulfilled. If the patient is mentally sound, has the capacity to make the decision, and is suffering from terminal illness and is destined to die within six months, such a law can help the patient to curtail not only his sickness and suffering but also the suffering of his family and friends along with saving the money that additional medical treatments will require, provided the medical treatments are ensured to fail and the patient won’t survive more than six months. the utilitarian approach to ethical decision making is supported in this case of choosing the right or wrong based on the greater good, and if a person who is suffering along with family and friends wants to end his/her and family’s sufferings and reduce the pain by physician assisted suicide then he/she is thinking about the greater good rather than his personal benefit.

Reference:

American Medical Association, The Committee on Bioethical Issues of the Medical Society of the State of New York articulates a similar position in "Physician-Assisted Suicide," New York State Journal of Medicine 92 (1992): 391.