In this article a palliative care physician reports from experience about how patients’ wishes for assisted suicide are often transient and how doctors cannot be certain what treatments or life events influence them to change their minds and want to live. A patient with a doctor-prescribed lethal dose in his or her possession may commit suicide on one of the days he wants to die, never living to see the next day when the smallest change in his life could have made it seem worth living.
Thanks to Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition for posting this article, by Dr. Joshua M Hauser, a palliative care physician at Northwestern University’s Buehler Center on Aging, Health, and Society. The article, which you can read at http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2014/09/physician-assisted-suicide-clinicians.html,was originally posted at http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/832058_2.