Assisted suicide

Assisted Suicide “Physician-assisted suicide is the provision by a doctor, consciously and legally, to a patient who has competently requested it, of the means for that patient to end his or her own life” (McCuen 10). Large amounts of lethal drugs such as barbiturates and carbon monoxide, are inhaled to painlessly cause death. Usually a physician, family member, or a friend fulfills someone’s request for help in dying. Usually it involves a terminally ill patient …

…excludes assisting someone to die (Smith 45). This is the wrong way to go about defining the scope and limits of the doctor’s proper function. In some extreme circumstances, the best service a physician can render may be to help a person hasten death in order to relieve intolerable, unnecessary suffering that makes life unbearable, as judged by the patient. This would be an enlargement of the physician’s role, not a contradiction of it.