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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | March 20, 2011
From the March 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Where doctors stand
Nationwide, such polls as there are show doctors are pretty split on the matter. In a Medscape survey of 7,000 doctors last year, 46 percent of doctors supported physician-assisted suicide in some cases, and 41 percent opposed it (the rest said, “It depends.”). In this, doctors are close to the general public. A 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center found the public evenly split, with 46 percent approving, and 45 percent opposing, assisted-suicide laws.
Doctors might be divided, but medical societies are less so and overall tend to oppose it. The American Medical Association, the country’s biggest doctors’ organization which represents under one-third of U.S. physicians, is quite succinct about the topic. “Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's professional role,” the group says in its guidelines.
The American College of Physicians, which also opposes the DWDA, worries it could ruin the doctor-physician relationship.
“There’s a fear that physicians and patients may lose trust with each other if physicians are seen to be helping in this way,” says ACP president-elect Dr. Virginia Hood, who practices in Vermont, a state now debating its own assisted-suicide ballot measure.
But Hood was quick to point out that ACP’s members have not reached a consensus on the issue, and that there’s no way for the society to enforce its opposition. Participating with the law is still up, ultimately, to the conscience of the individual practitioner.
Jack Kevorkian, the controversial euthanasia champion, who recently served eight years in jail for helping Thomas Youk commit suicide, believes the medical societies are blinded by their allegiance to what he calls “eccentric Pythagorean dicta.”
That is, they are stuck following the precepts contained within the Hippocratic Oath. The oath is attributed to the ancient Greek healer Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.), the so-called father of medicine, although some scholars believe it actually comes from the school of Pythagoras, the famous mathematician and philosopher who thought it was immoral to eat beans.
This oath, in the incarnation handed down to us, does take a fairly hard “right-to-life” ethic: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, Ludwig Edelstein’s translation reads: “I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.”
But except for one school in New York, doctors don’t actually take the Hippocratic Oath. Often, they take a modified World Medical Council-developed oath, called the Declaration of Geneva, that enjoins the budding physicians not to do harm, but is vague about what constitutes harm. And unlike the Hippocratic Oath, all mention of not giving deadly drugs – or performing abortions – is out.
