(DOWNLOAD) "Physician-Assisted Death in the United States: Are the Existing "Last Resorts" Enough?(Essays)" by The Hastings Center Report # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Physician-Assisted Death in the United States: Are the Existing "Last Resorts" Enough?(Essays)
- Author : The Hastings Center Report
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Life Sciences,Books,Science & Nature,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 220 KB
Description
Although there has been relatively little activity in the last ten years with regard to legal access to physician-assisted death, this fall a citizens' initiative in the state of Washington is proposing an Oregon-style law that would allow legal access to potentially lethal medication for terminally ill patients, subject to defined safeguards. As the rhetoric inevitably heats up, this seems like a good time to review areas of progress in palliative and end-of-life care and to consider whether laws like the one on the table in Washington are either needed or desirable. Several things are clear: (1) Palliative care and hospice have improved in terms of access and delivery, and they remain the standards of care for addressing the suffering of seriously ill patients. (2) Despite state-of-the-art palliative measures, there will remain a relatively small number of patients whose suffering is insufficiently relieved. (3) Several "last resort" options, including aggressive pain management, forgoing life-sustaining therapies, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, and sedation to unconsciousness to relieve otherwise intractable suffering, could address many of these cases. (1) The question remains as to whether physician-assisted death--that is, providing terminally ill patients with a potentially lethal prescription that they could ingest on their own to relieve otherwise intractable suffering by directly hastening death--should be one of these last resort options.
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