Advice and care for patients who die by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking is not assisted suicide

BMC Medicine

Debate

Andrew McGee¹  Franklin G. Miller² 

[1] Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St, 4001, Brisbane, Qld, Australia;Medical Ethics in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, 425 East 70th Street, 10021, New York, NY, USA;

关键词: Physician assisted suicide;    Right to refuse food and water;    Voluntary palliated starvation;    Voluntarily stopping eating and drinking;    VSED;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12916-017-0994-2

 received in 2017-08-17, accepted in 2017-12-13,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA competent patient has the right to refuse foods and fluids even if the patient will die. The exercise of this right, known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), is sometimes proposed as an alternative to physician assisted suicide. However, there is ethical and legal uncertainty about physician involvement in VSED. Are physicians advising of this option, or making patients comfortable while they undertake VSED, assisting suicide? This paper attempts to resolve this ethical and legal uncertainty.DiscussionThe standard approach to resolving this conundrum has been to determine whether VSED itself is suicide. Those who claim that VSED is suicide invariably claim that physician involvement in VSED amounts to assisting suicide. Those who claim that VSED is not suicide claim that physician involvement in VSED does not amount to assisting suicide. We reject this standard approach.ConclusionWe instead argue that, even if VSED is classified as a kind of suicide, physician involvement in VSED is not a form of assisted suicide. Physician involvement in VSED does not therefore fall within legal provisions that prohibit VSED.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017