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Currently the position of a doctor is quite intolerable if a sane suffering dying person already having optimal palliative care requests or indeed pleads for help to die.
According to our shameful law what can the doctor say other than 'I am afraid I cannot do that. You will have to wait for nature to take its course.'
In practice the doctor is very likely to expedite death with drugs.
UK doctors, the medical Royal Colleges and the BMA should be ashamed of allowing UK law to so clearly serve the anxieties of society and doctors and not the desperate needs of the patient.
Gradually the law is being changed in other countries to enable the doctor to give the needs of the patient absolute priority and provide truly patient-centred care.
Re: What readers thought about The BMJ’s articles on assisted dying
Currently the position of a doctor is quite intolerable if a sane suffering dying person already having optimal palliative care requests or indeed pleads for help to die.
According to our shameful law what can the doctor say other than 'I am afraid I cannot do that. You will have to wait for nature to take its course.'
In practice the doctor is very likely to expedite death with drugs.
UK doctors, the medical Royal Colleges and the BMA should be ashamed of allowing UK law to so clearly serve the anxieties of society and doctors and not the desperate needs of the patient.
Gradually the law is being changed in other countries to enable the doctor to give the needs of the patient absolute priority and provide truly patient-centred care.
Dr.Chris Burns-Cox
Consultant Physician (Retd)
Competing interests: No competing interests