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Essay on Physician Assisted Suicide

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Physician Assisted Suicide

Physician Assisted Suicide
Physician assisted suicide is murder. Using euthanasia, increased dosage of morphine or injecting patient’s with a lethal combination of drugs to slow his/her breathing until he/she dies is also murder. Physician assisted suicide is morally wrong. The classical theory for physician assisted suicide is utilitarianism because according to Mosser 2010, “utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines the moral value of an act in terms of its results and if those results produce the greatest good for the greatest number.” Utilitarianism will solve the physician assisted suicide problem if all of the physicians will stand by the oath they say. According to the Hippocratic …show more content…

Some patients that are terminal ill generally lose their desire to live and their dignity. So they ask their physician to assist them with committing suicide.
Suicide is the act of deliberately or intentionally taking his or her own life.
Attempted suicide is when death does not take place, despite an attempt by the person concerned to kill him or herself (black/med/suicide/2010). Assisted suicide is helping another person commit suicide or a person asking for medication to self-administer and provoke death (Harrold, 2009). Some physicians are using a lethal combination of drugs and or euthanasia on patients with or without their consensus. Euthanasia/active euthanasia (sometimes called “mercy killing”) occurs when a person, usually a physician or nurse, performs an act (e.g., administering a lethal injection) to end a patient’s life. Additional descriptors for euthanasia include “voluntary” (i.e., the patient requests euthanasia) (tcmd/euthanasia/2009). The routine practice of physician-assisted suicide raises serious ethical and legal concerns. What should a physician do in a situation where the hospital is in a weather disaster and he/she has patients on medical ventilator machines that are keeping them alive and the patients have to be evacuated because the hospital is severely flooded and there is no

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