Raven Birk

10/11/14

Journal Research #4

Summarize: This chapter was debating whether or not doctor assisted suicide for patients is medically ethical or not.  The main debate being that it could be considered more harmful to the patient to keep them alive and that death could be an easy ending to their suffering.  If the patient wishes to die then is it the job of the doctor to provide that option? Many doctors believe not and refuse to even council someone to kill themselves using drugs nor will they recommend a physician who will.  Other doctors like Dr Jack Kevorkian believe it is part of their job and will actually help patients die. 

 

Synthesize: On the ethical level, this is quite a new approach to the issue because now we see doctors helping actual patients commit suicide.  This information is extremely different than the information presented in second two articles that I read where sounded as though the doctors’ oath was actually spoken by all doctors and that it is the supreme law of the medical field.  Doctors could probably still get into some real legal trouble with the assisted suicide if the proper paper work is not completed before the action. However it kind of fits in with the first article that I read because it stated that some doctors see the criminals as a form of sickness that death can cure and that doctors do actually participate in some executions

 

Critical Thinking: If there are so many problems with the lethal injection both administering it and in expenses, why don’t they just switch to methods of executions that are slightly more difficult to mess up.  Doctor Kevorkian uses a gas mask that fills the patients lungs with carbon monoxide as one of his ways of assisting his patients in their suicides, that method sounds like its fairly easy to implement, quite painless if the patient is put under anesthesia, and much more cost effective.  He has other ways that sound rather painless as well however the mask is the easiest for non-medical prison staff to execute.  Also it can be inferred that this is basically saying that there are indeed doctors out there that are willing to assist in killing people and lethal injections go quite smoothly for doctors as it is really just the equivalent, action wise, as administering medicine to someone in the hospital.  If doctors go through with these actions in the prisons, will it really effect the medical field enough actually involve assisted suicides back into the medical field? Would this morally bother some doctors enough to prevent it from happening?  Do the medical “laws” not apply to all doctors or is it really just a code that is rarely broken?

 

Questioning and Planning: I would like to find an article that gives me an idea about how feasible it is to implement assisted suicide back into the common medical world because killing prisoners is a mere stone’s throw away from that morally.  I also need to find out more about the actual medical laws when it comes to killing both prisoners and patients. Also, would like to map out a moral compass on these issues more.

 

 

 

Contemporary Debates in Bioethics by Arthur L Capian and Robert Arp. Published by Oxford