Physician-assisted suicide - Michigan's temporary solution

Article Abstract:

Jack Kevorkian's approach to death challenges the medical community to change its impersonal treatment of dying. Kevorkian had helped 15 people commit suicide as of May 1993. In an effort to stop him, Michigan suspended his medical license in Nov 1991. On Dec 15, 1992, the day Kevorkian supplied carbon monoxide to the seventh and eighth people he helped, the governor signed Michigan's anti-assisted suicide bill. The law established a Commission on Death and Dying to make recommendations to the state legislature. The second part of the law made assisted-suicide a crime punishable for up to 21 months and will be repealed after the commission submits its recommendations. Most Americans say that they want to die painlessly at home with friends and family, but the majority die in the hospital, slowly and often in pain. While Kevorkian's approach is extreme, it should be a signal to the medical community to listen to the wishes of dying patients, to comfort them and relieve their pain and to make hospice care a viable option for them.

Michigan, Medical ethics

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The promised end - constitutional aspects of physician-assisted suicide

Article Abstract:

It is likely that the Supreme Court will strike down the decision of two US Circuit Courts of Appeals if the High Court decides to hear the case. The two appeals courts ruled that state laws that prohibit assisted suicide are unconstitutional. However, it appears that the courts had no legal argument on which to base this decision. It has always been legal to give patients pain medication they could use to end their life as long as the physician's intent was to ease their pain. The Supreme Court may allow states to permit physician-assisted suicide.

Cases, Terminal care

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Congress, controlled substances, and physician-assisted suicide - Elephants in mouseholes

Article Abstract:

The impact of Congress on the authority of states to set medical practice standards by enacting the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970 is discussed. The US Supreme Court has concluded that physician-assisted suicide is not a legitimate medical practice as it violates the position of various medical organizations and the attorney general's power under the CSA consists only of restricting the prescribing practices of physicians of drugs that have a potential for addiction or recreational use.

United States, Legal issues & crime, Government regulation (cont), Government regulation, Legal/Government Regulation, Medicine, Practice guidelines (Medicine), United States. Congress, Medical practice

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