Doctor-Assisted Suicide

Clea Benson of the Bee Capitol Bureau
(Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, November 14, 2004)writes,
"The Bush administration last week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn
Oregon's assisted-suicide law. Doctors' groups and the Catholic Church have
long opposed allowing physicians to help patients die."
If a person is suffering excruciating pain, narcotics do nothing to improve one's living standard, and that person's only reprieve from physical and mental anguish
is death, then why shouldn't that person be allowed to tell his doctor to assist her or him in a painless transition from life to death? Wouldn't allowing the doctor-assisted suicide be more humane than forcing the person to suffer through doctor-assisted pain and misery?

Untill they either make life support free, manage completely painless waiting, and or viable and practical immortality, as both our elders and adults (mentality questionable), it should really be up to the dying.

But who am I to impose my unsure opinions on those so sure they need to be imposing theirs.

Some might say an hour of unhappy life is worth an eternity of death. Others might say quite the opposite. It really depends on one's ability to tolerate pain and to tolerate life, and, I suppose, having tolerated life up until then also probably factors in. Let's see what others, if any others, have to say. I cannot see federal legislation being imposed on patients and doctors preventing a patient's right to die. That, most likely, should be a state's issue.

Personally, I don't really care.
I wouldn't allow it out of concern that the doctor's would get a shitload of lawsuits and whatnot from deranged and crazed family members that were in denial that the patient wanted to die by his or her own will.

You obviously do care or you wouldn't have commented. Or what is it, you want to flex your philosophical muscle? Since you've commented, then, I'll humor you: don't you think that if doctors caring for patients who are in such excruciating pain, where drugs numb not only the pain but their senses as well, know well enough how to tend to their patients' needs in order to barely live and painfully so, that they would know know to tend to their patients' needs in order to die correctly?

Surely physicians are much smarter than you or I.

I bet you quite a few aren't.
Especially here in the States,
I know because I've suffered enough of it.

Enough of what?

I watched PBS's "Does God Really Exist?" about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. Freud suffered from mouth cancer from smoking. Doctors cut away all they could, but the cancer became unbearable. Freud made a deal with his doctor that, if the pain should get so great as to be maddening, then the doctor must give him an overdose of morphine. That is, in fact, how Sigmund Freud died. I call that merciful.

Untill practical immortality is achievable, we know we will die, if someone wants to go early, that's their business.

What, exactly, is practical immortality? Can a person be practically immortal? If Moses lived nine hundred some odd years, does that count as being practically immortal?

Practical, as in safe, consistent, and attainable.

Enough of the corruption of the medical and pharmaceutical industries in complete free-market capitalist countries like the US, that's what I've had enough of. You just try working at a private hospital for two years to see the obscene injustice and cruelty that goes on to those who are too "poor" to deserve good health and treatment, and then have your own health almost fucked up permanently because the doctors you trusted were only there to make sure you'd get worse and worse so you'd keep switching medications that were all patented to begin with.

Then come speak to me about whether you'd want to trust a physician with your life. Or lay your life in his or her hands, most of them are overworked anyway and that has a serious effect on their quality of treament (of patients).

I don't give two shits about philosophical reasoning, try social reasoning and see how well that works with this thing called REALITY.