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Yet again you seem to be missing the point. Not quite good at this game are you?
Thats what i think anyway!
I would rather be put to death comfortably with a painless injection if i was dying of an incurable disease or was crippled or something!
Thats just me though.
I was only asking... :rolleyes:
Sorry, but no they are not the same.
I think that some people would rather just die than live out their last few weeks/days/hours in pain or whatever.
I think people should have the choice for themselves. After all, it is their life.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful. I'm not saying we should put safeguards in place. But there are many situations in which the intention of the patient would be crystal clear, yes or no?
If I were to sign a contract (supposing such thing was set up) in full possession of my faculties in which I made it clear that if I ever were to have an accident and be permanently paralysed or in a permanent vegetative state I should be euthanised, and a few months later I had that accident, can I have my euthansia please sir? Yes/no? Little room for abuse or confusion there, I hope you'll agree...
Dignity is on the eye of the beholder, so to speak. If a person believes slowly degenerating over a period of months towards an unavoidable death is not dignified, then it is not dignified- for them of course.
Look, I'm not saying we go euthanasing people at random. I'm saying in most cases should have the patient's consent. You must agree that in some cases at least there can be no doubt whatsoever that the patient wants to die. For instance the aformentioned case of the Spanish man paralysed from the neck down and bed ridden for life. So are you for helping them to die or not? And if not, why not?
But my objection is that your perspective on ill health and disability will inevitably change when you are put in that situation. Christopher Reeve never saught euthanasia - he argued for the development of better treatments for spinal injuries. If we euthanise those with suffering, we lose the incentive to alleviate it. If dignity is no subjective, can we avoid linking dignity in death exclusively with euthanasia then? Most cases? This is the slippery slope.
I'm not for the taking of life, absolutely not. Because I don't want that responsibility. I support the improvements of medical treatments at the end of life, such that dignity in death is not reliant on the premature active ending of life by a third party.
Of course it would be a really difficult thing to ask a doctor to do, and I really wouldnt want doctors to be forced to do it.
I just think in very select cases there are ways we could ease people out rather than just 'let nature run its course', death is horrid, I'm just suggesting for those who expressly wanted it we could make it a little less horrid.
If not a trained medic then who? A relative who stands to gain from any will?
A trained medic of course, I just wouldnt force doctors to do it if they didnt want to. This of course could present difficulties of its own.
Which really make this option null for her, in those circumstances then.
I feel for the relatives in these cases, I really do. I feel for the patients who I see every day with their grey pallour which marks them out, I really do. But I also fear for a society which considers that killing someone is an option. I worry that this is more about the relatives pain, than the patient's.
Kentish makes some excellent point about the implications of such a policy. It's easy to see the high level "it will prevent suffering" argument and I don't think anyone could really argue with that case. But the devil is in the detail and the implications, and it's those which mean that this policy whould never be implmented.
I fully appreciate the problems with such a policy, but the arguments about wills and exploitation seem a tad bizarre to me. If someone is at death's door anyway, then the people will still get the will money; all that is different is the lack of pain.
I can appreciate why people recpoil at the idea of it, but as Skive said, putting down a dog that's screaming in agony is seen as compassionate and humane- why is it any different for humans?
Asking a stranger to do something like that....welll......I can see why the medicals who post here feel iffy about it. And the problem that we have is that vague policy rules our organisations, and it's a blunt club when really a scapel is needed in cases like this.
Only a patient who is compus mentus, or had it written in a living will, assessed by two independent consultant clinicians at a specified interval [i.e. one week on a different day and at a different time to ensure that the first consultation was valid and no factors on that day had influenced the decision] willing to do it in consultation with the family and the multi-disciplinary team, however, only the patient can make that decision, no one else.
^ My personal opinion.
No, two weeks before she passed away she was in the garden having some fresh air and at that time she was poorly but not to the extent as she was prior to her death. If there was a system that allowed patients to sign a statement asking for doctors to let her slip away in her sleep then I really feel that she would have asked for that.
Of course when someone is not thinking straight for themselves then I fully agree its a no go area but when people are fully aware whats going on around them then let them choose after all it is their life.
You are telling me that people have access to to diamorphine so if they wanted to end their life they are in the position to do so but they choose not to. Im telling you that in the late stages of lung cancer some patients would not know what day of the week it was let alone know that they had diamorphine in their home (im basing my view on what I witnessed with my mother).
Also I dont see it as giving up on her, I see it as helping her go to sleep peacefully and with dignity. Im not gonna get into what she was like before she died but all I will say is that it was not a very nice experience and im talking from what I actually saw first hand, not a story that someone has told me.
at the end no she didnt request to end her life but talking to her well before the illness was diagnosed she had said that she would not like to die with pain and suffering blah blah.
i would agree.
i don't think it's something that should be considered willy nilly, but if someone is definitely 100% going to die, and it's just a matter of when, they should, if lucid enough, be given the option to either be assisted in their own death, or essentially put to sleep.
i've been in the not fantastic position of watching two close relatives die, and when someone is terminally ill and has been for a while, you have already lost them. at that point euthanisia is not killing them, it's helping them, and i only hope that if i'm ever in that position the law will allow me to make my own decisions about how i die rather than forcing me to suffer until my body gives up.
No, because as ive already stated they did eventually get my mam sorted, but getting the medication right aint as simple as that which you are most probably aware of. It takes time to get the right dosage so whilst they are trying to sort out the medication the patient is suffering.
They know roughly how long to expect the patient to survive (my Father was told she only had a couple of weeks), so if they know that the patient only has 7/14 days then why not just help them sleep peacefully rather than wait for x amount of days till they can sort the medication ?
But someone with say Huntingdons or Motor Neurone... all the palliative care in the world won't help them and surely they have the right to die when they want.
They do. It's called suicide.
Okay, this is difficult because I am talking about your Mum, but I am trying to be objective.
Why wait until she is in such pain inthe first place, why couldn't she have chosen to take her own life then? She was capable by the sounds of it... so why pass the responsibility onto someone else?
It is much harder to kill yourself easily with things in the home, I'm sure no one would want their gran to take an OD on paracetamol.
And of course then you are guessing when is the cut off point, and potentially loosing valuable time with your relatives.
Of course they wouldn't, especially if there was a nice warm NHS bed and doctor to do it for them.
The hardest part about taking your own life is actually going through with it, it is incredibly easy to find ways to kill yourself. And that really is my point about "responsibility", because it's so hard to actually do it yourself getting someone else to take on responsibility is an easy option.
Look at most of the situations which have been discussed here, they are degenerative illnesses where the patients has been lucid and mobile for some time. But it's only at the point where their facilties fail that euthanaisa is considered. Why? Why leave it so late? Why not take control of the situation when you can do it yourself?
Is it because life is precious so we should grab every moment? Is it because taking any life is not something which is easy [emotionally] to do?
If not wanting to suffer, or not wanting your relatives to see you suffer is the motive for euthanasia then why wait? Why not do it on diagnosis, or at the point when further treatment is not an option?
As Kentish said, making people comfortable is what we should be trying to do, not finding ways to kill them quicker, not finding some poor sap to take on the responsibility for doing this for us...
Of course it is only when they are in screaming pain that they want to end it.
Why would they want to be eased out before?
I don't expect it's an easy thing to do, and I sure as heck wouldn't force any doctor to do it, just as I wouldn't force any doctor to perform abortion.
Sometimes killing them to stop their suffering is the most comforting thing that can be done for that person. It is largely agreed that it is humane to put pets to sleep rather than watch them suffer, why does the same not apply to human life? Is human life somehow different?
I would want to be eased out of life rather then being left to scream in pain in a bed for weeks. I don't see why it is such a moralistic problem, especially as most people who are against euthanasia on people would quite happily euthanase a cherished pet.
Sometimes the best palliative care is death.