Everyone has the right to live. But so should we have the right to die in certain circumstances. I find it completely obscene that the government, lawyers, doctors, insurance companies and your own family want to see you suffer to the last. It has to be stopped.
It is a terrible truth that over the last 30 years or so there has been a shift in medical attitude from one of life-saving and caring to one of death avoidance (where the surgeon only cares that the patient doesn't die on his watch and that he still gets the fat backhanders for tne pharmaceutical companies). Anyone who can't see the difference needs to wake up, and any doctor or lawyer who can't see the difference needs to be struck off forthwith. I always thought medicine was a modern science, and yet it still clings to the religious notion of the unalterable, ring-fenced, sanctity of life. I would argue that when privacy, dignity and quality of life are gone and a patient is only proppped up by drugs or machines, then the sanctity is forfeit and it's time to go.
Certain categories of patient should be legally allowed to take their own lives (at a time and manner of their choosing), with help if necessary (also such persons should not be prosecuted) if, and only if, THE PATIENT CAN COMMUNICATE THAT IS WHAT THEY WANT. It should not be a process that can be interfered with by doctors, psychiatrists, consellors, next of kin etc., because nobody but the patient can decide what is unbearable.
The categories allowed would be something as follows:
(a) Terminally ill (cancer, MS, MND, fatal genetic diseases etc)
(b) Those in constant, unremitting pain
(c) Tetraplegic patients
(d) Multiple amputees (accident or disease)
This has to be quite short and simple. Other conditions or combinations could be argued for, but that would only hinder a legal change to help the very worst cases who should not have to suffer any more.
Jack Orchison, December 7, 2013.
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