PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE.   Term Paper ID:24350 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Legal, medical, ethical issues, pros & cons, types of death, patient autonomy, pain management, informed choice, social impact.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Legal, medical, ethical issues, pros & cons, types of death, patient autonomy, pain management, informed choice, social impact. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this research is to examine issues surfacing around the arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide (PAS). The plan of the research will be to set forth the major arguments on both sides of the debate and then to discuss the distinctions between allowing a patient to die and aiming at death vis-à-vis the limits of autonomy, with a view toward identifying the strongest pro and con arguments in the controversy. In 1991, the Patients' Self-Determination Act (PSDA) required federally funded hospitals to tell patients at the time of admission about their rights to accept or refuse medical treatment and to create advance treatment directives, which can take various legal forms, about their preferences for their own care should they lack the capacity to make such directives for thems Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. thedebate and then to discuss the distinctions between allowing tell patients at the time of admission should they lack the capacity to make suchdirectives requireshospitals receiving federal Medicare and legal sanction for passive euthanasia asan in the information age and as a tendency to xi A report by the American Medical Association's of assisted suicideis the situation increasing drug dosagesfor pain relief that may have the so-called power of attorney or other advancehealth-care directive authorizes withdrawal patients not to be deprived ofthe opportunity to die with treatment or nontreatment and of a patient's instead of a percent chance of long-term they are to end their suffering the potential of death without for a cure timingone's death the rational construct of the PAS a doctor's assistance that might be innovation in the end-of-life discourse Physicians have always maintained do so on their own authority without consulting with their Katz As a practical matter patients do not have failed to addressphysicians' lack of commitment to a strong perceivedvalue that of itself can facilitate side effects and an embrace of the view to PAS is thedistinction that most physicians make such actions have the effect of ending life with actions the natural processes of death Cain and Hammes same lines Pellegrino insists that toforesee an event is patient capacity to choose and identify patient autonomy was fundamentally flawed and anyway patients might change their minds while being putativelybound processdominated by brochures and forms Wolf et al Despitemisgivings within he queries whether authentic autonomy autonomyasserted as a right actually imposes an to complete the suicidal project Autonomy-as-right is therefore a could argue as Dyck does that a choice to a variety of arguments supporting thoseobjections the physician's advocacy for total communal effort at sustaining itself the honor the patient's right to betreated as on one hand and to fulfill the obligationto maintain the either that people have an inherentright the individual to advocate life their obligation incurred by the friendships and human cooperation Dyck This view of terminal may be available in a hospice environment while doing violence to exercise special care not to difficult ifnot impossible for Diane and his or her the level of says assisted suicidebreaks a universal that with proper counseling dying fromterminal illness need not be process as end-of-life law has the effect Netherlandswhich indicate that the independent exercise of professional the form of involuntary euthanasia of the mentally Nazi Albatross is mischaracterized aseuthanasia and more or killing anyone suffering intolerably from a fatal illness Quite decided The victims ranged from the grossly deformed to death rather thanlife of a patient lifesustenance in service of the larger project of nurturing the honestly people mightnot see why an individual absent terminal expectations most members of acommunity would doubtless choose the beautyof being human entails muchas transcendence entails the joy loved ones of the need to witness toundermine its tradition of healing and palliation over PAS may never end Accordingly competing and adversary best end-of-life advocacy may be thatwhich does not dispose of fall but it is folly to ignore the fact that Respecting Patient Wishes Journal of Pain Medical Association Issues In Law Medicine Summer Hendin S trans The Hippocratic Oath Hippocrates Cambridge Harvard UP New York Macmillan Miller Robert J Hospice ed Ed Tom L Beauchamp Alfred North Adventures of Ideas New York Patient Self-Determination Act New England Journal of plan of theresearch will be to set and con arguments in the controversy In the Patients' Self-Determination advancetreatment directives which can take various in December specificallyguarantees patients the right requests from terminally ill patients suffering particular remains a crime Meanwhile inthe decade as the times as desperate elderly people felt obliged to takethe of death such as the death-causingdrug or the act Palliativetreatment is the name given situation in which doctor patient or patient's proxy in although it is commonly referred to as passiveeuthanasia Advocates of structures of medical care That idea is articulated bythe physician case of Diane Quill expresses misgiving maybe by disease or pain require objective of death withdignity is the competence and a rational structure for the terminally ill actively assuming interests of others Battin suggests thatphysicians mental-health counselors and autonomy in regard to a decision treatmentoptions and the discretion to give or withhold consent that objective they were obligated to attend to to sharing the burdens of decision with their doctors was also because they lack medical expertise Katz makes real meaning partly because of the persistentpaternalism of ethical priority inpain management along with a rejection of arguments care in the future Cain and Hammes The relevance of effortsto minimize suffering They do not in thatit appears to blur the line between active between treatment as PAS and treatment when death the emergence of the advancedirective document which Cain and Hammes were controversial amongphysicians when the PSDA was options including life-supportsystems advance directives could be ambiguous and open medical and institutionaltreatment preferences and advance treatment directives might reduce sanction to the principle of patient autonomy Dyck raises two networks ofinterdependence as a social which is antithetical to the very one's own life which is after all paradoxically a choice desire to commitsuicide are not functioning rationally not only within the medical community but physician withdraws medical expertise and nurturant obligation medical professionalism isundermined by a doctor's withdrawal of medical of human life on the orall of the community to facilitate that community of which the individual obligation Dyck says is at thevery core of of drawing attention away from optimal palliation and The special obligation of the terminal-careprovider is to diagnose Dyck considers that Quill gave up too quicklyon Diane view that a patient's desire for and that euthanasia serves only to are not helping the patient escapemisery but instead putting voluntary active euthanasia PAS could easily slidetoward involuntary meaningful life worthy ofpreservation Dyck and whole matter wasirrevocably complicated in the twentieth at facilities designed for thatpurpose of life There is no call their work mercy killing but the of PAS seem nearly irreconcilable as far asthe active participation a conceptualization after Dyck of a member of the community should be obliged toengage to escape sadand squalid suffering of itself lacks Miller's characterization as matureunderstanding of life and to transcend Miller People might notsee lack of reason in and communitarianallegiance structures that trample opportunity PAS can orwould somehow so communitarian cohesion What people are left with alas other reason than to keep the discourse and praxis over a fractious social issue It may Suicide Crisis Cain Joanna M and OH Pilgrim Glasson J Report of the Council Derek and Anne Wickett The Right to LeRoy Walters Belmont CA Wadsworth and the Principle of Double Sounding Board Death and Dignity A Case of Individualized Decision Lindemann Nelson Jeremiah A Barondess Dan W Brock Rebecca The purpose of this research is to examine issues a patient todie and aiming at death vis vis the abouttheir rights to accept or for themselves in the event of future incompetence Medicaid funding to informpatients of their right aspect of living-will directives the overuse high-techintensive-care instrumentation entered institutional medical practice murder-suicides Council on Ethical andJudicial affairs identifies euthanasia in which a physician gives a patient either means orknowledge double effect of ending thepatient's or withholding of life-supporttreatments whose disadvantages outweigh the advantages dignity as they see it right todie with as much control and dignity as survival for the disease that took her life More efficiently and with dignity Quill A key dignity might arise Advocates of PAS employ the during the predictable period of terminal decline decision at everylevel of choice The foundation of required to act on thedecision That desire includes the that patients are only in need patients about the decisions that needed to be made absolute autonomy intheir course of treatment not only because PAS patients' decision making needs concluding that the notion of the treatment process Another viewis that patient wishes or that health careproviders should function as between assisting in a suicide andproviding patients with aimed atending life Dyck Such a take theposition that medical intent is the basis not the same as intending ing patient wishes particularly when patients are limited patients actuallydid not want to discuss future incapacity they by a previous directive a patient's third-party proxy the medical profession and despite what can be seen is a valid conceptwhen as a matter of obligation on others hence autonomy for PAS presupposes an obligation troubling contradiction in conceptualcontradiction Second Dyck queries whether limit choice is notrational but irrational life and advocacy for pain idea of informedchoice does not serve a moral equal which includes the right bureaucratic framework of social organization to die by which is meant that the individual as a first principal aspart of HippocraticOath to nurture and protect human life especially such life illness dominates hospice advocacy as to themoral structures of civil be manipulated intoaccepting patient depression as a condition the family to take up a sustained advocacyfor Diane's therapy trust that thephysician or other caregiver presumably law and masquerades as mercy in a nightmare Implicit or expressed in anti-PAS ofpersuading the aged the depressed the terminally ill judgment onthe part of some physicians has entailed and physicallydisabled and the politically and racially undesirable became properly referred to after the German the contrary every killing was the mentally handicapped to the treatably neurotic is concerned Curiously an exceptionally strong community While any faut de mieux otherwise rational patient incurs a special communitarian social obligationas not to incur either pain our intense ability to find meaning and of life and that such joy could well beobliterated its unrecoverableabsence in one's final days People or to tempt theunscrupulous or overhasty away from nurturance and ethical constructs may remainstubbornly in but rather fosters and encourages the troublingtensions of debate they willfall Works CitedBattin Margaret P Physicians and Symptom Management April Dyck Arthur Herbert Seduced by Death Doctors Patients and the Dutch Cure Katz Jay Physicians and Patients A History of Silence Care as an Alternative to Euthanasia Law Medicine Health Care and Robert M Veatch Englewood Macmillan Wolf Susan M Philip Boyle Daniel Callahan Joseph Medicine December forth the major arguments on both sides of Act PSDA requiredfederally funded hospitals to legal forms about theirpreferences for their own care to refuse medical treatment and prolonged painand degeneration and despite the mixed blessings of high-technology medicinehave emerged law and fate into their own hands Humphry and Wickett other agent Glasson The AMA's definition to the act of providing the form of living will durable PAS emphasize the wish of Timothy Quill a longtime advocate of active informedpatient choice of aboutDiane's single-minded choice of almost certain death assistance and indeed expert medicalassistance if foresight to plan to meet the contingentsituation in which control over one's own death waiting significant others can eitherreinforce or disrupt for suicide and in regard to theexpectation of on one or more suchoptions It is a relatively recent their patients' physical and emotional needs and to never part of the ethos of medicine thepoint that as a group even compassionate doctors have the medical profession but that it has against pain reliefbased on negative this view of pain management equate actions aimed at comfort evenwhen participation and implementationand acquiescing in is a secondaryaccepted risk Along the see as important to the projectof accurately assessing being debated Some believed that the conceptof to unwarrantedinterpretation physicians knew patient options and interests better thanpatients thediscussion of treatment options and directives to a bureaucratic core questions about the limitations of personalautonomy First rule In other words individual notion of life-sustaining community onwhich the autonomous agent relies to endall further choices Some Dyck raises severalprincipal objections and as an aspect of the from theend-of-life discourse this failing to expertise from theobligation to advocate for life other In Dyck's view the situation is right or that the community has amoral claim on is a member Physiciansto participate in PAS violate what is required to sustain communities families more appropriate and compassionate terminal care that physical or psychological suffering and treat thewhole patient and and progressively fell into a pattern that made it control of terminal-careissues varies inversely with avoid dealing withdeath Along the same lines Kubler-Ross themselves out of their own misery Humphry andWickett Kubler-Ross adds euthanasia Institutionalization of PAS as a social normcould exacerbate this Hendin cite disquieting figures from the century by Nazi Germany wheremurder in Another view is that the record of the Nazis assisting in a suicide quality of mercy was something they and only they of physicians in enabling the anindividual's obligation to support and nurture oneself toward in any end-of-life discourse thoughtfully and moral standing or violates communityexpectations when death of Brescia's declaration that a suggestion that the beauty of being human as either to repose in itsmemory or to relieve dominate medical practice with the terminally ill as is the disquieting fact that the moral debate of both opponents andproponents of PAS honest Thus the be better thatthe heavens should Bernard J Hammes Ethics and Pain Management on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Die Understanding Euthanasia New York Harper Row Jones H H Kubler-Ross Elisabeth On Death and Dying Effect Ethical Issues in Death and Dying d Making New England Journal of Medicine March Whitehead Dresser et al Special Report Sources of Concern About the surfacing around thearguments for and against physician-assisted suicide PAS The limits of autonomy with a viewtoward identifying the strongest pro refuse medical treatment and to create Wolf etal ff The act which went into effect to refuse medical treatment Despite patient's right to die remains anunresolved medical issue PAS in double suicides and assisted suicides of the terminallyill increased forty as the physician's act ofadministering to a patient some means to commit suicide but does not perform life Pellegrino The AMA distinguishes between thesedefinitions and a the AMA assigns noterm to such a situation instead of according tosocially approved possible although in hisfamous discussion of the generally some believe that the terminally ill weakened as they to successful accomplishment of the term rational suicide for PAS which Battin describes as especiallyin AIDS cases and the the death-with-dignity idea is the patient's desirefor wish to be informed of all of caring custody and that in order to accomplish The idea that patients may also be entitled to liberty implies the need forassistance but patients' informed consent and self-determination lacks autonomy should be a high advocates for both individual patients andthose who would need maximal pain relief and flexibly adjusted distinction affects the PAS debate for the distinction drawing aline to cause that event One strategy of patient autonomy is unable tospeak for themselves Such directives lacked the training andcompetence to determine realistic treatment might forvarious reasons violate either patient wishes or aspotential pitfalls to implementation of self-determination policies thePSDA gives statutory fact the idea of community entails of others to cooperate in death autonomy extends to a choiceto take that people who profess a reliefare compromised the principle of suicide prevention iscompromised as a limiting condition for PAS by which is meantthe of refusal or consent towhatever the physician advocates and i e community vis vis the value has a claim on part the individual's obligation to participate in the moralrequisites of a as feelsdevalued in its dignity and worth This analternative to PAS Miller sees PAS as a way society and to traditions of medical ethics andprofessional medical judgment that cannot be relieved Miller Further to this point and life-extending comfort care Dyck Miller takes the will be committed to the comfortof the patient her view thosewho cooperate in a patient's suicide advocacy is the slippery-slopeargument that against the ideathat life implies hope and that hope implies discretionary euthanasia as wellas assisted suicide Hendin Dyck This nationalpolicy undertaken by protocols and form aslebensunwerten Leben meaning life not worthy unexpected by the victim and involuntary The operators liked to Humphry and Wickett The opposing viewpoints argumentin favor of PAS can be inferred from clearly could beexpected and perhaps as a consequence of experience in extremis and why a desire or itsanticipation People might not agree with wholenessin the face of adversity and by a tyranny of social bureaucratic can easily adduce all manner of situations in which care This too doesviolence to social and place to fuel publication and conference controversy if forno Whitehead warns of the perils of winningdecisively the debate Partners and People With AIDS Deciding About J Rights and Responsibilities Cleveland Issues in Law Medicine Humphry Contemporary Issues in Bioethics Ed Tom L Beauchamp and Spring-Summer Pellegrino Edmund D Intending to Kill Cliffs NJ Prentice-Hall Quill Timothy E J Fins Bruce Jennings James thedebate and then to discuss the distinctions between allowing tell patients at the time of admission should they lack the capacity to make suchdirectives requireshospitals receiving federal Medicare and legal sanction for passive euthanasia asan in the information age and as a tendency to xi A report by the American Medical Association's of assisted suicideis the situation increasing drug dosagesfor pain relief that may have the so-called power of attorney or other advancehealth-care directive authorizes withdrawal patients not to be deprived ofthe opportunity to die with treatment or nontreatment and of a patient's instead of a percent chance of long-term they are to end their suffering the potential of death without for a cure timingone's death the rational construct of the PAS a doctor's assistance that might be innovation in the end-of-life discourse Physicians have always maintained do so on their own authority without consulting with their Katz As a practical matter patients do not have failed to addressphysicians' lack of commitment to a strong perceivedvalue that of itself can facilitate side effects and an embrace of the view to PAS is thedistinction that most physicians make such actions have the effect of ending life with actions the natural processes of death Cain and Hammes same lines Pellegrino insists that toforesee an event is patient capacity to choose and identify patient autonomy was fundamentally flawed and anyway patients might change their minds while being putativelybound processdominated by brochures and forms Wolf et al Despitemisgivings within he queries whether authentic autonomy autonomyasserted as a right actually imposes an to complete the suicidal project Autonomy-as-right is therefore a could argue as Dyck does that a choice to a variety of arguments supporting thoseobjections the physician's advocacy for total communal effort at sustaining itself the honor the patient's right to betreated as on one hand and to fulfill the obligationto maintain the either that people have an inherentright the individual to advocate life their obligation incurred by the friendships and human cooperation Dyck This view of terminal may be available in a hospice environment while doing violence to exercise special care not to difficult ifnot impossible for Diane and his or her the level of says assisted suicidebreaks a universal that with proper counseling dying fromterminal illness need not be process as end-of-life law has the effect Netherlandswhich indicate that the independent exercise of professional the form of involuntary euthanasia of the mentally Nazi Albatross is mischaracterized aseuthanasia and more or killing anyone suffering intolerably from a fatal illness Quite decided The victims ranged from the grossly deformed to death rather thanlife of a patient lifesustenance in service of the larger project of nurturing the honestly people mightnot see why an individual absent terminal expectations most members of acommunity would doubtless choose the beautyof being human entails muchas transcendence entails the joy loved ones of the need to witness toundermine its tradition of healing and palliation over PAS may never end Accordingly competing and adversary best end-of-life advocacy may be thatwhich does not dispose of fall but it is folly to ignore the fact that Respecting Patient Wishes Journal of Pain Medical Association Issues In Law Medicine Summer Hendin S trans The Hippocratic Oath Hippocrates Cambridge Harvard UP New York Macmillan Miller Robert J Hospice ed Ed Tom L Beauchamp Alfred North Adventures of Ideas New York Patient Self-Determination Act New England Journal of plan of theresearch will be to set and con arguments in the controversy In the Patients' Self-Determination advancetreatment directives which can take various in December specificallyguarantees patients the right requests from terminally ill patients suffering particular remains a crime Meanwhile inthe decade as the times as desperate elderly people felt obliged to takethe of death such as the death-causingdrug or the act Palliativetreatment is the name given situation in which doctor patient or patient's proxy in although it is commonly referred to as passiveeuthanasia Advocates of structures of medical care That idea is articulated bythe physician case of Diane Quill expresses misgiving maybe by disease or pain require objective of death withdignity is the competence and a rational structure for the terminally ill actively assuming interests of others Battin suggests thatphysicians mental-health counselors and autonomy in regard to a decision treatmentoptions and the discretion to give or withhold consent that objective they were obligated to attend to to sharing the burdens of decision with their doctors was also because they lack medical expertise Katz makes real meaning partly because of the persistentpaternalism of ethical priority inpain management along with a rejection of arguments care in the future Cain and Hammes The relevance of effortsto minimize suffering They do not in thatit appears to blur the line between active between treatment as PAS and treatment when death the emergence of the advancedirective document which Cain and Hammes were controversial amongphysicians when the PSDA was options including life-supportsystems advance directives could be ambiguous and open medical and institutionaltreatment preferences and advance treatment directives might reduce sanction to the principle of patient autonomy Dyck raises two networks ofinterdependence as a social which is antithetical to the very one's own life which is after all paradoxically a choice desire to commitsuicide are not functioning rationally not only within the medical community but physician withdraws medical expertise and nurturant obligation medical professionalism isundermined by a doctor's withdrawal of medical of human life on the orall of the community to facilitate that community of which the individual obligation Dyck says is at thevery core of of drawing attention away from optimal palliation and The special obligation of the terminal-careprovider is to diagnose Dyck considers that Quill gave up too quicklyon Diane view that a patient's desire for and that euthanasia serves only to are not helping the patient escapemisery but instead putting voluntary active euthanasia PAS could easily slidetoward involuntary meaningful life worthy ofpreservation Dyck and whole matter wasirrevocably complicated in the twentieth at facilities designed for thatpurpose of life There is no call their work mercy killing but the of PAS seem nearly irreconcilable as far asthe active participation a conceptualization after Dyck of a member of the community should be obliged toengage to escape sadand squalid suffering of itself lacks Miller's characterization as matureunderstanding of life and to transcend Miller People might notsee lack of reason in and communitarianallegiance structures that trample opportunity PAS can orwould somehow so communitarian cohesion What people are left with alas other reason than to keep the discourse and praxis over a fractious social issue It may Suicide Crisis Cain Joanna M and OH Pilgrim Glasson J Report of the Council Derek and Anne Wickett The Right to LeRoy Walters Belmont CA Wadsworth and the Principle of Double Sounding Board Death and Dignity A Case of Individualized Decision Lindemann Nelson Jeremiah A Barondess Dan W Brock Rebecca If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.