Euthanasia

Hippocrates lived before the time of Christ. Prior to his time, the medical practitioner had a dual role. One was to cure. One was to kill. The great contribution of Hippocrates, which passed into the Christian era and guided the medical profession for the next two millennia, was to separate the curing and killing functions of the physician. Henceforth, a physician would only cure. Down through the centuries in the Hippocratic oath has come the phrase, primum non nocere, "First do no harm." Now the oath of Hippocrates is no longer sworn by graduating medical students. With abortion, and the onrush of euthanasia, doctors, tragically, have again assumed the dual role.

The word Euthanasia originated from the Greek language: eu means "good" and thanatos means "death". One definition given to the word by the Netherlands State Commission on Euthanasia is "the intentional termination of life by another at the explicit request of the person who dies." That is, the term euthanasia normally implies that the act must be initiated by the person who wishes to commit suicide. However, some people define euthanasia to include both voluntary and involuntary termination of life. Like so many moral, ethical and religious terms, "euthanasia" has many meanings. The result is mass confusion. So it is important to differentiate a number of vaguely related terms.

Passive Euthanasia - Hastening the death of a person by altering some form of support and letting nature take its course. Perhaps the most common form of passive euthanasia is to give patients large doses of morphine to control pain, in spite of the likelihood that the painkiller will suppress respiration and cause death earlier than it would otherwise have happened. Such doses of painkillers have a dual effect of relieving pain and hastening death. Administering such medication is regarded as ethical in most political jurisdictions and by most medical societies.

These are performed on terminally ill, suffering persons so that natural death will occur sooner. It is also done on persons in a Persistent Vegetative State Ð'- individuals with massive brain damage who are in a coma from which they cannot possibly regain consciousness.

Active Euthanasia Ð'- This involves causing the death of a person through direct action in response to a request from that person. Examples for these are people who have been diagnosed with degenerative, progressive illnesses like ALS, Huntington's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and HIV/ AIDS.

Physician Assisted Suicide Ð'- A physician supplies information and/or the means of committing suicide (a prescription for lethal dose of sleeping pills, or a supply of carbon monoxide gas) to a person, so that they can easily terminate their own life. The term "voluntary passive euthanasia" (VPE) is becoming commonly used.

Involuntary Euthanasia Ð'- This term is used by some to describe the killing of a person who has no explicitly requested aid in dying. This is most often done to patients who are in a Persistent Vegetative State and will probably never recover consciousness.

Proponents of euthanasia are quick to accuse doctors of not letting a patient die in peace. The typical picture drawn is of an old man strapped in bed, in constant pain, clearly dying. He has tubes in every natural body orifice and in several artificial ones. The doctor is keeping him alive, perhaps to obtain a larger fee, perhaps because the doctor does not want to admit that he has lost the battle for this man's life.

Years ago, truly life-saving treatments were limited. Only too often, the physician's role was to comfort and eliminate pain as the patient progressed to an inevitable death. Then, with the advent of antibiotics, better surgery, intensive and coronary care units and new drugs, it became possible to prevent death from occurring. For physicians, there was a learning process, from excesses in keeping dying people alive "too long" to learning how to "let go" and allowing natural death to occur. Today, almost all doctors handle dying patients well.

Pro-euthanasia literature constantly emphasizes pain, constant, intractable, unrelieved, agonizing pain. Physical pain, with rare exceptions, can be controlled. Sound advice, when confronted by a story of a person's loved one being in constant pain, is "Get another doctor." If yours can't control pain, get one who does. The second type of pain which is the main reason why