Are you sure? I’ll find out tonight or tomorrow as we have a 5th year med student relative with us for a a few months.

I would be very interested to hear what they are taught they are allowed to do and where the line is for them in terms of legal risk.

They can even prescribe pain medication if they know it will hasten death as long as hastening death is not the purpose of the high dosage and instead to relieve pain. At the point a terminally ill patient needs that sort of medication its probably more up to the doctor than the patient though.

Are you sure? I’ll find out tonight or tomorrow as we have a 5th year med student relative with us for a a few months.

(Don’t ask. It’s one of wifey’s enormous family entourage that I have to either support financially or give them temporary shelter. I married all 97 of them including their kids).

My understanding is the morphine suppresses the breathing so eventually the dose gets so high people just stop breathing – or the disease itself kills them – probably a combination of the two.

That’s how I understand it too. It’s a fine balance, but the medication can be the factor causing death. However most of these terminal patients, as far as I know are not in a great deal of pain towards the end.

My understanding is that docs can prescribe an amount of opiates that won’t terminate an individual but it will be enough to put them in a medically induced coma. Isn’t that right?

They can even prescribe pain medication if they know it will hasten death as long as hastening death is not the purpose of the high dosage and instead to relieve pain. At the point a terminally ill patient needs that sort of medication its probably more up to the doctor than the patient though.

So if you want to minimise pain at the end you want to choose your doctors very carefully and know what their moral stance on the subject is in the hope of getting one that will be willing to veer on the pain relief side rather than the “keep alive as long as possible” side.

I’ve spent substantial time with a couple of relatives at the end of a terminal illness and neither was put in a medically induced coma. Rather at the end they were coming in and out of conciousness depending on the level of pain relief at the time. As the level of pain relief increased their breathing became increasingly laboured. My understanding is the morphine suppresses the breathing so eventually the dose gets so high people just stop breathing – or the disease itself kills them – probably a combination of the two.

My problem though is that we’re not going to end up with a libertarian version of youth in Asia. We’re going to possibly end up with Tubbsie Milne’s , the Emily list nazi pack and Shane Wand’s who is trying to close the deficit gap.

Seriously, would you want any of these raving lunatics near a switch?

Re the other issue you mentioned.

My understanding is that docs can prescribe an amount of opiates that won’t terminate an individual but it will be enough to put them in a medically induced coma. Isn’t that right?

We won, Yobbo.

I don’t want a government that also pays for the pills deciding on life and death stuff. You’re putting the cart before the horse here. Privatize the medical system first and then talk about it.

We have a semi privatised system. Private hospitals largely won’t do it because it is against their beliefs (ask them about why Jesus was speared through the side though).

All you need do is decriminalise the actions of a doctor to allow/enable someone of a sound mind and in suffering and who is dying to kill themselves.

Currently, that stupidly stands as murder.

Even if a doctor humanely finishes someone off simply by gradually upping their morphine to relieve pain, it can be argued they “murdered” the patient.

This is the second kind of subtle euthenasia you and I endorse JC.

All you need to do is change the criminal law. In a public system, if you changed the health laws other than abolishing regulation, you’d go down the wrong path.

When was the last time you tried to buy a gun, or a lot of morphine, or a lethal dose of sleeping tablets?

Really Yobs, you’re asking this.

I could buy a hand gun in about 30 minutes. The Greek hardware store owner a couple of burbs down the road would sell me one.

As for buying sleeping pills. Here’s what you would do. Arrange an appointment at several docs offices, tell them you can’t sleep because… I dunno, there was a death in the family or lost your job and need a prescription of sleeping pills to tide you over. Collect four or so prescriptions and you’re off to the races.

It’s not as easy as you seem to think.

I don’t think it’s as hard you you think either.

But that takes away from the story.

I don’t want a government that also pays for the pills deciding on life and death stuff. You’re putting the cart before the horse here. Privatize the medical system first and then talk about it.

We do it to animals all the time, because death is inevitable, and getting it over quickly reduces the suffering.

It’s kind of sad that we require humans to suffer through pain that we wouldn’t inflict on animals.

Of course there are also plenty of cases of animals that are euthanised simply because they have no economic value, or the cost of the treatment isn’t worth it.

That’s the trick when trying to apply this to humans. How can you minimise suffering while still ensuring that people who want to keep living are not euthanised against their will?

As for the people saying that killing yourself is easy because you can just buy a gun, take loads of morphine or a bunch of sleeping tablets….When was the last time you tried to buy a gun, or a lot of morphine, or a lethal dose of sleeping tablets? It’s not as easy as you seem to think. You can’t even buy Sudafed easily in Australia any more, because someone might use it to get high.

I think at the very least that people who wish to kill themselves should be allowed to buy the stuff that would allow them to do it. At present, if you were laying dying in a hospital bed, and asked the doctor to bring you a bottle of liquid morphine so you could drink it and die, that doctor would be committing a crime even by putting the bottle beside your bed. That needs to change.

Sure, but I’m asking whether it should be reconsidered. If it is now legal to commit suicide and that was once a crime then how does one justify prosecuting a helper?

I think, but I may be mistaken, it is because the former has been made legal out of compassion for those that fail in their object while the latter remains illegal in order to not encourage those who would assist in the commission of such wrongdoing.

But that difference is irrelevant to the question of which is nannying

Not really. A law which prohibits euthanasia is a law which prohibits persons from actively and deliberately taking lives even where the person concerned may have consented to the taking. The law also prohibits persons from amputating perfectly good limbs even where they consent to such enormities and it does this by prohibiting doctors from acceding to the prospective amputees wishes. I don’t think this is ‘nannying’. Nannying involves the government insinuating itself into the mundane aspects of my life even where I am perfectly able to look after myself. Now in the situation concerned, where I am terminally ill, or suffering from Alzheimer’s, that is in situations where I am actually quite vulnerable; I don’t think a simple law which prevents me from procuring assistance to die, or one which prohibits persons from touting their services as ‘angels of death’, is in fact ‘nannying’, but if it is, it is really ‘nannying’ of a homeopathic variety. It is the qualified ‘nannying’ which exhorts that we care for the orphan, the stranger, and the widow; I have no problem at all with this.

I don’t think Schiavo’s case has any relationship to voluntary euthanasia,

The case is of course related to voluntary euthanasia by the word euthanasia.

And a plastic bag over the head is the omission of air or the commission of self-suffocation?

What? Look, I’m not inventing an original distinction here. If someone refuses a second bout of chemotherapy which is judged as unlikely to succeed, they haven’t killed themselves, the cancer has done that.

It can be the only way someone can end their suffering,

There is the principle of double effect that can avoid this situation.

What a load of nonsense. I don’t consent to mortality either, but tough shit.

I love it when you lose it.

To which she didn’t consent to, dot. But, yes, apart from that the matters were ‘totally different’. Dear oh dear.

What a load of nonsense. I don’t consent to mortality either, but tough shit.