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Wow. This touches home with me on many levels. I lost my parents a few years ago. Both suffered. I lost several other close family members who also suffered. An

Wow. This touches home with me on many levels. I lost my parents a few years ago. Both suffered. I lost several other close family members who also suffered. And just last week somebody I was close to told me they were dying of cancer. And I'm a libertarian that strongly believes that government should keep its nose out of my life. So, of course, I'm going to play devil's advocate, at least a bit. Because if you can't defend the other side's points well, you shouldn't be in the argument. Here's the thing: physician-assisted suicide is one thing if the doc gives you the pills and you take them on your own. It's something else if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you. Then we're getting into the state telling doctors what types moral views they should hold. Hey, I'm all for you shooting your cat if it's sick. What I'm against is the community all making some collective decision about who's got to go and when, and who has to do the work. That's fucked up. This thing has to be a personal choice among everybody involved: docs, nurses, family, the patient. I could imagine in many cases the patient wants to whack themselves and the family hates the idea. Fine. Then let the guy do it. On his own. Or perhaps the docs have given up hope, but for religious reasons they will never pull the plug. Fine, then let the patient do it. There's a decision to be made, somebody should make it, and the rest of society should butt out -- either from disapproving or forcing everybody else from doing things they don't want to do. It's just as bad to make somebody kill somebody else as it is to make somebody keep somebody else alive in this endless suffering nonsense. The problem here is a search for some universal rules for a very personal thing. I don't see that playing out too well. In many cases, we have elderly losing their minds while family members hope against hope that they recover. What to do then? With the lack of a living will, I think the family members get to decide. That's why we have living wills. I don't like that result, but there it is. (I'd also add that this means the family members should be able to dose up grandma with enough morphine to put her out of her misery -- and I imagine such a thing happens a hell of a lot more than we will ever know. Institutionalizing people and placing all of this in bureaucratic hands is the crux of this problem.) Also Scott, sorry to hear about your dad.

marquis 13y ago
>if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you I'd see it working similarly to gay marriage: no bishop or chaplain is forced to marry two people, but it leaves plenty of open-minded officials to help if they want to.
MetaCosm 13y ago
It is important to understand that unless you build an "extreme" living will (food and water denial), there are many circumstances where you will still be tortured indefinitely. I speak from family experience. My father suffered many strokes towards the end. This caused neuropathic pain ... completely untreatable pain coming from inside his brain (primary somatic sensory cortex). He lost his ability to speak, move, and was basically just in continuous agony, only really maintaining the ability to suffer, with no hope for recovery. Even with durable power of attorney, withholding food and water requires court orders and takes time (sometimes months)... why is making someone die horrifically of dehydration perfectly legal, but painlessly giving them a shot is illegal? > I'd also add that this means the family members should be able to dose up grandma with enough morphine to put her out of her misery -- and I imagine such a thing happens a hell of a lot more than we will ever know That is how my fathers suffering ended. Not by a family member, in the end it was by a nurse. The nurses and doctors and everyone seemed to give quiet nods of agreement after days of failed attempts to mitigate the constant grimace of agony. I don't think anything was ever said explicitly, but eventually a male nurse came in and made it clear that if we wanted it, today could be the last day. The decision ended up falling on me, and I said yes, the door was closed and the nurse pulled out multiple needles of something, to this day I am not sure what, but it was obviously they were packaged individually for dosage control and he had a handful of them. he slowly injected each into the IV without saying a word and my father slipped away. I am not sure I have ever been more grateful for anything prior or since.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Thank you for sharing this.
- usefulcat 13y ago
  If you don't mind saying, in what country did this take place?
  - MetaCosm 13y ago
    USA. It was absolutely illegal, but it was also IMHO, the only moral thing to do.
icebraining 13y ago
It's something else if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you. I think you're arguing against an argument nobody made. People who advocate for the legalization of assisted-suicide just want the person who does the assistance to not be persecuted.
RogerL 13y ago
I am not sure why someone else's morals should dictate my life. If you don't want to do all the duties of a doctor, don't be a doctor. Back up a few hundred years, and by some it was considered immoral to cut into a person. It was immoral to dissect a corpse for study. Heck, we still have people that think it is immoral to give medicine. Shall we allow Christian Scientists to take the Hippocratic oath and then refuse to medicate based on a moral stand? No thank you. Find another job if this job offends you. End of life is far more important to get right than the above (IMO). At least while I am sane and mobile I could realize that my doctor thinks medicine is immoral and go find alternative care. But in my last days I'm not going anywhere, I'm not making any decisions, I just get to suffer, or not. My morals say unremitting suffering is torture. I submit my morals trump your morals when it is my life, and only my life, in question.
rz2k 13y ago
I think the confusion here comes from viewing it as a single issue with sides rather than multiple aspects. It's a crude comparison, but it reminds me of a discussion on Reddit where someone was struggling over whether it was time to put his dog down or not. One poster responded by essentially asking whether the OP liked their dog, and if they did why they would kill it, and then summed up by stating that anyone who could consider euthanizing a dog never loved it in the first place. I actually like the sentiment if it is talking about a dog that had grown inconvenient, and it was probably expressed by someone who deeply cared about a first dog, but had never had a dog grow old. Of course, there were some pretty irate responses from people who had dealt with the real situation of a dear friend no longer enjoying life and feeling constant pain. Perhaps one of the difficult parts is that even the clearest cases, it is just resigning yourself, since doubts will always remain. It isn't difficult to imagine that you can always induce one more tail wag from your suffering dog, or presumably to imagine a glint in the eye from a loved one. That OP was in search of information to help make a difficult decision, and the only context that was relevant was that particular dog's health, not someone's ideological objection seeking to make it an issues with sides. Imagine for a second if there were a sides debate over "medication" (of all types). There would be many constituencies lining up on those fakes sides. Some would talk about abuse, and health danger of using too much medication. Some would talk about personal liberty, and that people should be able to take what they want. Then there are some who believe that suffering is intrinsically virtuous, while others believe it is unethical not to treat pain. Some might believe that it is cheating for someone who doesn't exercise to take statins, while another group would argue that as prevention they ultimately save money and increase quality of life. I'm sure the people with eugenicist tendencies would want their say, too. And quite likely all of this would occur without any consensus over the relative importance of making people productive, or lucid, or comfortable, or keeping them alive, because the importance of these goals aren't only personal, but informed to varying degrees by the differences in regional and socioeconomic cultures. Simply put, there aren't two sides to the vaccinations-and-marijuana issue, because it isn't even one issue in the first place. Is there someone who worries that it is a slippery slope from using general anesthesia in the operating room to vaccinating children? Probably, but you'd have to accept a lot of premises before even being able to engage in such a conversation. While there may be people who are in favor of or against two independent things for a single reason, those reasons are not the reasons that most people care one way or the other about either. Conflating them would be a trick to elevate those frameworks. Likewise, whether or not to knock off an older person who wants to live but can't pay for their nursing home, isn't the same issue as assisted suicide, which isn't the same as a 'do not resuscitate' order, which isn't the same as decisions about who does or does not get access to a life-saving operation. Allowing special groups to decide which issues get conflated into a single debate and then turns into two sides is an abdication of the responsibility to think critically on important policy matters.

marquis 13y ago

>if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you I'd see it working similarly to gay marriage: no bishop or chaplain is forced to marry two people, but it leaves plenty of open-minded officials to help if they want to.

MetaCosm 13y ago

It is important to understand that unless you build an "extreme" living will (food and water denial), there are many circumstances where you will still be tortured indefinitely. I speak from family experience. My father suffered many strokes towards the end. This caused neuropathic pain ... completely untreatable pain coming from inside his brain (primary somatic sensory cortex). He lost his ability to speak, move, and was basically just in continuous agony, only really maintaining the ability to suffer, with no hope for recovery. Even with durable power of attorney, withholding food and water requires court orders and takes time (sometimes months)... why is making someone die horrifically of dehydration perfectly legal, but painlessly giving them a shot is illegal? > I'd also add that this means the family members should be able to dose up grandma with enough morphine to put her out of her misery -- and I imagine such a thing happens a hell of a lot more than we will ever know That is how my fathers suffering ended. Not by a family member, in the end it was by a nurse. The nurses and doctors and everyone seemed to give quiet nods of agreement after days of failed attempts to mitigate the constant grimace of agony. I don't think anything was ever said explicitly, but eventually a male nurse came in and made it clear that if we wanted it, today could be the last day. The decision ended up falling on me, and I said yes, the door was closed and the nurse pulled out multiple needles of something, to this day I am not sure what, but it was obviously they were packaged individually for dosage control and he had a handful of them. he slowly injected each into the IV without saying a word and my father slipped away. I am not sure I have ever been more grateful for anything prior or since.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Thank you for sharing this.
usefulcat 13y ago
If you don't mind saying, in what country did this take place?
- MetaCosm 13y ago
  USA. It was absolutely illegal, but it was also IMHO, the only moral thing to do.

icebraining 13y ago

It's something else if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you. I think you're arguing against an argument nobody made. People who advocate for the legalization of assisted-suicide just want the person who does the assistance to not be persecuted.

RogerL 13y ago

I am not sure why someone else's morals should dictate my life. If you don't want to do all the duties of a doctor, don't be a doctor. Back up a few hundred years, and by some it was considered immoral to cut into a person. It was immoral to dissect a corpse for study. Heck, we still have people that think it is immoral to give medicine. Shall we allow Christian Scientists to take the Hippocratic oath and then refuse to medicate based on a moral stand? No thank you. Find another job if this job offends you. End of life is far more important to get right than the above (IMO). At least while I am sane and mobile I could realize that my doctor thinks medicine is immoral and go find alternative care. But in my last days I'm not going anywhere, I'm not making any decisions, I just get to suffer, or not. My morals say unremitting suffering is torture. I submit my morals trump your morals when it is my life, and only my life, in question.

rz2k 13y ago

I think the confusion here comes from viewing it as a single issue with sides rather than multiple aspects. It's a crude comparison, but it reminds me of a discussion on Reddit where someone was struggling over whether it was time to put his dog down or not. One poster responded by essentially asking whether the OP liked their dog, and if they did why they would kill it, and then summed up by stating that anyone who could consider euthanizing a dog never loved it in the first place. I actually like the sentiment if it is talking about a dog that had grown inconvenient, and it was probably expressed by someone who deeply cared about a first dog, but had never had a dog grow old. Of course, there were some pretty irate responses from people who had dealt with the real situation of a dear friend no longer enjoying life and feeling constant pain. Perhaps one of the difficult parts is that even the clearest cases, it is just resigning yourself, since doubts will always remain. It isn't difficult to imagine that you can always induce one more tail wag from your suffering dog, or presumably to imagine a glint in the eye from a loved one. That OP was in search of information to help make a difficult decision, and the only context that was relevant was that particular dog's health, not someone's ideological objection seeking to make it an issues with sides. Imagine for a second if there were a sides debate over "medication" (of all types). There would be many constituencies lining up on those fakes sides. Some would talk about abuse, and health danger of using too much medication. Some would talk about personal liberty, and that people should be able to take what they want. Then there are some who believe that suffering is intrinsically virtuous, while others believe it is unethical not to treat pain. Some might believe that it is cheating for someone who doesn't exercise to take statins, while another group would argue that as prevention they ultimately save money and increase quality of life. I'm sure the people with eugenicist tendencies would want their say, too. And quite likely all of this would occur without any consensus over the relative importance of making people productive, or lucid, or comfortable, or keeping them alive, because the importance of these goals aren't only personal, but informed to varying degrees by the differences in regional and socioeconomic cultures. Simply put, there aren't two sides to the vaccinations-and-marijuana issue, because it isn't even one issue in the first place. Is there someone who worries that it is a slippery slope from using general anesthesia in the operating room to vaccinating children? Probably, but you'd have to accept a lot of premises before even being able to engage in such a conversation. While there may be people who are in favor of or against two independent things for a single reason, those reasons are not the reasons that most people care one way or the other about either. Conflating them would be a trick to elevate those frameworks. Likewise, whether or not to knock off an older person who wants to live but can't pay for their nursing home, isn't the same issue as assisted suicide, which isn't the same as a 'do not resuscitate' order, which isn't the same as decisions about who does or does not get access to a life-saving operation. Allowing special groups to decide which issues get conflated into a single debate and then turns into two sides is an abdication of the responsibility to think critically on important policy matters.