One of the great pretenses of assisted suicide advocacy is that the decision to overdose will be made between patients and caring doctors with whom they have a long-standing relationship.
Often, that is not true. If one’s own doctor says no, a suicidal patient need only go doctor shopping from an advocacy group. Indeed, in Oregon, some dead patients knew their death doctors for only two weeks or less before receiving their lethal dose.
Death doctors can prescribe out of their own area of medical specialty. Thus, in California, an ER doctor is going into the death doctoring business, which I discuss over at First Things:
Would anyone in their right mind trust an ER doctor to properly palliate the pain of terminal cancer or treat lethal congestive heart failure? Of course not!
The ability to provide excellent care for terminally ill patients requires medical specialization and ongoing professional education in the particular disease. That is why no ER physician worth his salt would assume responsibility for the medical care of terminally ill patients outside of a temporary emergency-room or crisis context.
But death doctoring isn’t about providing professional treatment for patients. Indeed, the suicide MD need not have any specialized training in terminal illnesses or be schooled in how to support such patients medically.
I give other examples. Jack Kevorkian was a pathologist and hadn’t treated a living patient since the 1950s.
In the Netherlands, Bert Keizer, a nursing home doctor, euthanizes cancer patients and others such as Parkinson’s patients, apparently not knowing how to properly palliate their suffering.
Worse, death doctors are able to prescribe lethally under a lower standard of care than treating doctors:
Treating doctors can be sued for malpractice if they breach the “standard of care” required of all doctors in a particular medical situation. Not death doctors. All they have to demonstrate is that they acted in “good faith.”…
A “good faith” legal standard is a very low bar. For example, what if the death doctor mistakes a non-terminal condition for a terminal one and writes a lethal prescription? As long as that lethal mistake was made in good faith, under the provision quoted above, it would seem not to be actionable.
Make the identical mistake as a treating doctor for the same patient, and prepare to meet your lawyer!
This looser standard for death doctors–the point making it easier to kill–is rarely considered when debating assisted suicide. It should be:
Advocates for legalizing assisted suicide assure us that such laws protect vulnerable patients. But that’s a mirage.
The fact that doctors are free to prescribe lethally for people with illnesses outside their areas of medical specialization—and to do so secure in the knowledge that they are legally less accountable than if they were treating the same patient—demonstrates the folly of legalizing doctor-prescribed death.
Another way of looking at it is that assisted suicide isn’t really medicine.
Worst MDs Can Be Death Doctors