Physician Assisted Suicide, Essay Example

My opinion is that Massachusetts should not allow physician assisted suicide.  First of all, when doctors graduate as full-fledged doctors, the oath that they take is, “Do no harm.”Doctors were meant to be healers, not killers.  While some patients may not trust their doctors implicitly because of errors they made in their treatments, they can, nevertheless, be relatively certain that their doctors are doing their best to live up to the oath they have taken.

I am totally against suicide; but, having said that, if terminally ill patients wish to exit this world, all they need to do is to overdose on some pills or substance that would not result in a painful death.  In most cases, where the affliction has been sudden and devastated the patient to the point where (s)he cannot manage that, usually all that has to be done is to disconnect them from the technology that is keeping them alive. I am happy that the Massachusetts Medical Society and the states association of hospice and palliative care workers oppose the ballot question.

While the safeguards are fairly good, I, nevertheless, believe that they have loopholes in them.  For instance, patients who are told that they have an incurable irreversible disease that will likely kill them within six months could easily be brainwashed by so-called loved ones to end their lives because they are a physical and financial burden to them.  Nowhere in the safeguards does it say that the patient must have intolerable pain in order to have their life ended.  Many people with cancer—like Larry Hagman, for instance—have worked until the day of their death. Had he chosen death six months before he died, Dallas would not have been reborn.