Should I Help My Patients Die?

Should I Help My Patients Die?
Efforts to legalize physician-assisted death
Court cases and bills introduced in 2017:
Efforts to limit, ban or criminalize
physician-assisted death
In states where it is now:
Efforts to limit, ban or criminalize physician-assisted death
This first patient of mine was not a simple case.
When I asked Dr. Shavelson how he might have proceeded with my patient, he said he would
have tried everything to relieve his distress without using the lethal medication.
My patient deserved an evaluation by a physician like Dr. Shavelson, not someone like me, with no training in this area and ambivalence to boot.
Given his interest in the topic, Dr. Shavelson felt a personal obligation to ensure
that this new practice would be carried out responsibly after the law was passed.
Dr. Lonny Shavelson, an emergency medicine and primary care physician in Northern California, has been grappling with the subject for many years.