Health
Survey Reveals Physicians' Concerns about Euthanasia
A blue ribbon study at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine has yielded the first authoritative survey of doctors' attitudes, practices, and experience with patients requesting assistance in ending their lives.
According to the study, a very small fraction of the 1,902 surveyed physicians said they had acquiesced to requests for euthanasia, although nearly 20 percent said they'd been asked. Specifically, 5 percent said they had provided lethal injections -- almost always pain medication for patients who were estimated to be within days of a natural death, and 3 percent said they had provided prescriptions, usually for homebound patients suffering profound fear, shame, pain, or loneliness.
This is a difficult area for many ThirdAgers. And few physicians who treat the elderly, including our own health specialist, Dr. Walter Bortz, have escaped the profound confusion that medical technology has created around the process of dying. For example, two-thirds of the physicians surveyed say they would not write a lethal prescription, were it legal to do so.
