Ethics of Assisted Suicides

Doctors can ethically help terminally ill patients commit suicide by prescribing sleeping pills or other drugs and telling them what dose will end their lives, a panel of prominent doctors concludes.

Doctors assisting patients in suicides “is certainly not rare” although they do not often talk about it, the group reported last week.

It added, however, that if doctors ease the way for death by carefully attending to the comfort and dignity of their hopelessly ill patients, requests for suicide should be rare.

The suicide guidelines were part of a report outlining doctors’ responsibilities toward their dying patients. Among other things, the paper urged doctors to give such patients as much pain medicine as they need to relieve their suffering, even if it hastens death.

“We really think that the physician has a responsibility to be actively involved in creating an environment in which a peaceful death can occur. That does not just happen,” said Dr. Sidney H. Wanzer, principal author of the report, said in the New England Journal of Medicine, .

The report is the second from a 12-member committee chaired by Dr. Daniel D. Federman of Harvard Medical School, former president of the American College of Physicians. The committee was convened by the Society for the Right to Die, a New York-based group.