Argumentative Essay On Physician Assisted Suicide

Physician Assisted Suicide: A New Age Remedy Modern medicine has advanced rapidly in recent decades leading to new approaches in prolonging life and overall improving people’s quality of life. The approaches range greatly, from chemotherapy for patients fighting cancer, to life saving organ transplants, to medicinal marijuana as a remedy for various complications. With such advancements, it is only natural that the human curiosity will pursue new ideas and different methods to attain the best quality of life possible. These new ideas often tend to be controversial and usually unsupported by the general public due to its extreme nature. Physician assisted suicide (PAS) is one of those subjects and there are many skeptics disregarding the idea,

Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (ODDA) is an example of a successful law that allows patients to seek physician assisted suicide, while simultaneously protecting the conscience of those who may object. In ODDA it specifically states that “[n]o professional organization or association, or health care provider, may subject a person to censure, discipline, suspension, loss of license, loss of privileges, loss of membership or other penalty” if a physician were to refuse to participate in PAS (Rienzi, 145). This means that a physician can refuse to participate in PAS without the fear of losing their medical license or any other career endangering consequences. The act also states that the reasons behind the refusal to participate do not matter, and can be due to religious, moral, or ethical views, making it more appealing to those who may have dismissed PAS for those exact reasons (Rienzi 146). ODDA not only protects physicians and patients, but extends to facilitators and those who may not have direct contact with the life ending process such as nurses, hospitals, medical facilities, or pharmacists who fill the prescriptions (Rienzi 146). The specificity of the law and the protection of conscience is what makes physician assisted suicide legal and a possible practice in Oregon. If other

The guidelines state that an individual must be at least eighteen-years-old, terminally ill with six or fewer months left to live, as well as a legal resident of the participating state (Fass, 846). This alone makes the window for valid and legitimate participants tremendously narrow, thus refuting any skeptical beliefs that this law applies to any average resident of a PAS participating state. The guidelines continue by specifying that the patient must be consciously aware and able to make decisions concerning to one’s own health, as well as supply a written request, signed in front of two witnesses, for life ending medication to the attending physician. Furthermore, the patient needs to make two oral requests, at least fifteen days apart, for a prescription of the lethal medication from their physician (Fass, 846). Patients interested in PAS undergo heavy diagnosis for psychiatric and psychological disorders such as depression and delirium, to determine whether their judgment is impaired or fully intentional. After a physician clears the mental state of the patient, they are by law required to mention alternatives to PAS, like hospice care or pain management (Fass, 846). If a patient meets all of the explicit guidelines, they are permitted to