Care of the Hopelessly Ill

Our purpose is to propose clinical criteria that would allow to respond to requests for assisted suicide from their competent, ill patients. We support the legalization of such suicide, but not active euthanasia. We believe this position permits the best balance a humane response to the requests of patients. . . and the need to other vulnerable people. We strongly advocate intensive, unrestrained intended to provide comfort for all incurably ill persons. When properly, such comfort care should result in a tolerable death, with symptoms well controlled, for most patients. Physician-assisted suicide never be contemplated as a substitute for comprehensive comfort care or working with patients to resolve the physical, personal, and social posed by the process of dying. Yet it is not idiosyncratic, , or indicative of a psychiatric disorder for people with an incurable to want some control over how they die. The idea of a noble, dignified, with a meaning that is deeply personal and unique, is exalted in great, poetry, art, and music. When an incurably ill patient asks for in achieving such a death, we believe physicians have an obligation to the request fully and, under specified circumstances, carefully to making an exception to the prohibition against assisting with a.