Press Junketeer  Posts: 425 Joined: 6 Apr 2008     | |
Infamous Scribbler  Posts: 507 Joined: 23 Dec 2007  | I think I can forsee a large banhammer looming overhead, and hordes of trolls just about to leap onto this thread and salivate on it.... I beleive that the matter is a serious one-and requires careful investigation into the facts. While i beleive it is a persons right to die, I do not beleive that a) Medical personel should not do it. Not 'be forced to do it' but just not do it- it's not their duty to kill people, under any circumstances. Let the family memebers push the button- that will give people pause for thought. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2237 Joined: 21 Jan 2008     | I'm for these cards, but I believe that it must be thought out carefully, and maybe there should be some sort of time-delayed activation of the cards coming into power (eg. You have to wait for 6 months before the card can legally be followed). This stems from my support of euthanasia. If a person is dying a slow and painful death, then why prolong it? Why make them suffer? Just to appease your conscious? |
Press Junketeer Posts: 425 Joined: 6 Apr 2008 |
You know, I'd considered that, although it isn't my intention to stir up anything. On the doctors not performing euthanasia, I think I can agree on that, I wonder if handing such a descision over to a medical professional absolves any qualms the patient or their family may have about the procedure. To be clear, I mean, is it easier to allow someone else to take your life than take one's own or, in the case where the person has not the faculties to agree (or has agreed ahead of time but at the time of the decision is incapacitated) is it easier or more diffucult for the family to do the deed? I think though, where either patient or family does think it over long and very hard, yet still decides to go ahead, then their wishes should be respected. It get's a little hazy though when a person has -not- expressed a wish to die ahead of time, yet is also incapacitated and when the decision has now fallen to the family alone. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1568 Joined: 4 Nov 2007   | People should have the right to do whatever they want with themselves. I've found it harder and harder to formulate a moral rule I can express simply and without exceptions but I suspect this will stay with me until I die. So, yes, permitting suicide is something I support.
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Copy Clerk  Posts: 64 Joined: 14 Apr 2008  | The flippant bit of me wants to say "well, after watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"... I should have known. Two words should have tipped me off: "Phantom Menace". I digress, not the point of this thread. Personally, I believe people should have a right to check out if they want. While I think I would approach the idea responsibly and compassionately, though, not everyone would. There are ethical concerns to take into account when you consider the idea of anyone willingly ending their life. The first concern, of course, is sheer efficiency. When you get right down to it, there's no "logical" reason to bother treating an elderly person (or any person, for that matter, even if it's a child) who's going to spend the rest of their lives getting sicker and sicker and sicker. Sure, leave them alone if they can still manage, but if they come in and you're looking at something incapacitating, it's illogical to bother treating them. You could get a much better payout for your efforts elsewhere. There are healthier people who would benefit more from the time and resources you're investing on an ever-increasing basis in keeping someone alive who's locked in a downward spiral. The trouble with that idea is it's both heartless and soul-less. Like it as not, humanity isn't really engaged in the business of efficiency. It's engaged in living, plain and simple, and there are quite a few people who worry that if you open the doors on euthanasia, you open the door on making the end of someone's life an arbitrary decision and you end up on that old "slippery slope". Where some other things are concerned, it seems foolish to think we can't avoid sliding down it, but this one really would be a much easier slope to slide down than most people think because it begins not by abandoning our virtues but embracing one of them. You can begin with simple compassion. For example, let's take a current standard a lot of people like: A person has the right to end their lives if they have a terminal illness, and two doctors sign off on it. Well, what's a terminal illness? Life is a terminal illness when you get right down to it. Every mother who gives birth has made sure another human being is going to die. It's just hoped they'll be able to live with their condition for quite some time before doing so. So, what's a terminal illness? Is it something that you're 100% certain to die of? I don't know any doctors who deal in 100% unless someone's already dead. Maybe it's only something you're likely to die of, but how likely is that? Who sets the standard? The easy answer is "the person with the illness and their doctors", but suppose you have one doctor who believes what you're suffering from is a terminal illness and another one doesn't. Suppose the other doctor simply won't sign off even though you have a terminal illness because they're morally opposed to you ending your own life. It certainly happens. Look at all the pharmacists who sued so they wouldn't have to dispense morning after pills or provide condoms to customers because they just don't believe in that sort of thing. My general take is "tough titties, if you don't like it, find a new line of work you hypocritical prick". It's a bit like a soldier throwing a fit because they found out they might have to actually go to war. In the end, though, you can't force people to do things like this. Then what do you do? Send the person to a third doctor? A fourth if needed? Keep rotating them around until you find two doctors willing to sign the form? That casts a lot of doubt onto the subject, doesn't it? If it was really terminal, why wouldn't the first two doctors sign off on it? You can find two doctors somewhere who are willing to sign off on just about anything, so allowing people to do that makes the standard a lot less meaningful. Then, what do you do? Get rid of the second doctor in such cases and say one signature is enough? You've just gotten rid of one of the safety checks on the system by doing that, haven't you? That leads you back to someone other than the patients and doctors involved setting a concrete standard and imposing it on them. It's only compassionate to give someone a way out rather than force them to keep suffering if they have doctors who refuse to help them. Why do you want them to have to suffer just because of someone else's misguided moral convictions? Suddenly, death becomes a regulated trade. Someone has to sit down and say "this is worth dying to avoid, but this isn't". You have doctors who are willing to play that system and diagnose illnesses from which patients might not be suffering to accommodate their desire to commit suicide. You have others who will misdiagnose patients to prevent it, and still others who will make diagnoses more likely to push patients into choosing euthanization because it's efficient and they think they're ultimately doing the compassionate thing by pruning the branches selectively... you know, for the greater good. Let's face it, if there's one thing we're brilliant at besides completely bullshitting ourselves in the face of overwhelming evidence we're wrong, it's completely fucking everyone around us in pursuit of "the greater good". Cobblestones of choice for the road to Hell and all that... Getting past that, though, there are quite a few illnesses guaranteed to kill you, but which have no time table whatsoever for doing so. Take Alzheimer's disease. Once you're diagnosed, there's no going back. We can control it. In some cases we can halt it where it is, but in the majority of cases, it's going to kill you. The trouble is, it could take months, or it could take two decades. No one really knows how long you're going to be stuck living with it as your brain slowly eats itself from the inside out and disassembles your personality piece by piece, unwinding you as if you were a broken watch spring. Is it compassionate to let them die now, before it takes hold, or do you bank on the odds they're going to have a couple of decades left and can lead meaningful lives for several years yet? Come to it, what about people who reach the point where they can't make that decision any more. There is an argument to be made that by the time Alzheimer's is noticable, the person in question has already lost enough of their reasoning abilities to be impaired beyond the point of deciding adequately. If there wasn't some significant impairment, would anyone have noticed they were suffering from Alzheimer's in the first place? Once there's nothing left but the suffering and the utter fear patients with advancing Alzheimer's have to deal with, do you keep them alive? They can no longer make the decision themselves, but surely if they COULD, they wouldn't want to keep going. Is it fair to force them to, or is the compassionate thing to make the decision for them? If the compassionate decision is to end their suffering, where do you draw the line? At what point do you make that decision for them? Sure, on one end of the spectrum it's obvious the person should be able to decide for themselves, and on the other end of the spectrum it's obvious they can't. There's an enormous grey area in the middle, though, and the closer you get to the middle, the less and less you're going to find agreement about just which side of the line you're on. That brings us to another concern: Family. The hope, of course, is that someone's family will want what's best for their ailing member. Then again, how often do you hear of people squabbling with one another like rats trying to hoard everything from a dead relative's estate for themselves? It's not uncommon, just like it's not uncommon for people, especially people who are weak and may not be thinking clearly due to their illness, to go along with what their family wants them to do. What if you have a family sitting there thinking they just can't afford a protracted illness because it's going to consume more resources than they have? What if you have a family who just wants the miserable bastard out of the way so they can divvy up the spoils? Should we turn a blind eye as they pressure a sick family member to choose an early death? None of that even gets us into the realm of "regular" suicide. The matter is very complex, and becomes more complex all the time. We seem to have more technical prowess than wisdom or understanding of what we're doing. The unfortunate upshot to that situation is that human knowledge surpassed human wisdom the instant the first caveman picked up a rock and realized they could kill someone else with it, and the gap between the two has been widening ever since. Some people are able to bridge the gap between the two, but there are untold numbers of them which don't even get close even with a lifetime's worth of practice and study. Coming up with a balanced solution and closing the holes human lives can fall through is a daunting undertaking to say the least, which is why the debate on the subject is so protracted. I can set my own standards, and I think they're the right ones. Why is there even a debate? Everyone should just do what I say because it's so obvious I'm right about the subject you're just being stupid if you don't agree with me. Easy-peasy. Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that isn't actually true. It may be nothing more than arrogance born from the "bullshitting ourselves in the face of overwhelming proof" and "fucking everyone else in the process because we're so damned sure we're the ones who are actually right" song and dance we so often perform. The question is, whose judgment is good enough that it should become the judgment for all people, and who's just fooling themselves into thinking it is? And that endless diatribe is just off the top of my head (though I'm sure its sheer length has encouraged quite a few people to start believing in euthanasia). As I said, it's a complex issue, and likely one which will vex us for a long, long time. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2212 Joined: 24 Apr 2008     | User banned for 1 week for this post. Your inability to read more than one paragraph at a -mod
Dear god... |
Copy Clerk Posts: 64 Joined: 14 Apr 2008 | Yes, unfortunately that's what happens when circumstances prevent me from sleeping and someone leaves me the opportunity to prattle on endlessly. Makes you kind of want to weep in terror, doesn't it? |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2212 Joined: 24 Apr 2008 |
i cant turn away... i often myself indulge in the text wall phenomena, but this is truly a thing of beauty. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 808 Joined: 22 Aug 2006 | When I took a course in Bioethics, much of our discussion on Right to Die centered around the case study of Dax Cowart. http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=3619&fID=749 That's a video of him speaking about his experience 30 years after the fact. If you're interested in this subject at all, you should look into him. That video is a good place to start, but if you Google it, you can probably find write-ups all over. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 854 Joined: 29 Nov 2007  | What's the rush? This train only goes in one direction anyways. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2449 Joined: 25 Jan 2008   | I strongly advocate a person's right to end their own life, and balk at the irony of the law surrounding suicide. If you try to end your life, but fail, you can be ticketed, arrested, and/or locked up in a nuthouse. If life was bad enough to try and end it, locking a person away and force-feeding them medication isn't going to improve their outlook. If a person chooses to end their life, be it suicide or refusal of medical treatment, it is one of my strongest beliefs that nobody has a right to prevent them. You can reason with them, plead or beg them to reconsider, but in the end you must abide by their wishes because it is their life to live or not. I would never ask a person to live in intense pain for the rest of their life, or to prolong a life that cannot be saved for the sake of a couple extra days or months... Life as a vegetable or in a coma, life in extreme agony, or with no hope of recovery, how is that worth living? The Christian/Catholic church considers suicide a sin, and despite all pretense of separation between church and state, this religious viewpoint is one of the largest factors in why outright suicide and refusal of treatment is contested and controversial. To me, it is so very wrong that a religion you may or may not even believe can have such an impact on your right to choose how and if you live. Specific to the article, I support the concept of the card, but not the result. If these cards were a government-issue item, kept on file with your medical records, and customized to each individual, then I'd be more supportive of the program. Keeping it on file would be a way to ensure your wishes are carried out even if life throws you a bad turn when you inconveniently don't have the card on your person (a slip in the shower for instance). The customized to the individual, more than a just "No Treatment", but a specific list of situations and how you want them handled. For instance, one person could have instructions to terminate life if in a "permanent" coma, but treat physical injury if brain damage isn't a concern. Another person could allow any and all treatment, but orders not to recessitate (sp?) if flatlined. Just a simple Treat/Don'tTreat is a little too vague for my comfort. |
Infamous Scribbler  Posts: 509 Joined: 8 May 2008  | i follow the same principles for suicide as i do for abortion. its your body, you can choose what to do with it, no one else. i believe with suicide(as well as abortion)its the only true thing you have control of in your(soon to be non-existant)life and as such should not be influenced by what other people say or think. im not going to go into the mentally impaired part cause i dont know all the facts about that and im not about to go find out. my two cents. |
Paperboy Posts: 29 Joined: 25 Apr 2008  | Ever had morphine? Yyyyeeeaaahhh... |
Infamous Scribbler Posts: 507 Joined: 23 Dec 2007 |
Oh fuck... time to break out the trollslaying gear. And yes, I've had morphine. Its not pleasant at all if you have to do something, you become light headed, dizzy, nauseous and confused- not at all pleasant. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1286 Joined: 29 Dec 2007 | When a patient is visibly in pain and dying from a terminal disease, then the patient should have the right to choose death. After all, I'd hate to be kept alive while my organs engaged in a brutal gang fight while some priest prattled on about the sins of suicide. In a case in which the patient would not be coherent, I think the decision should rest in the hands of the family and medical personnel they choose. If my mind is gone and there's no hope of it returning, then I don't think I'll care much if my scheming relatives pull the plug. Being brain-dead isn't much better than death, it just costs more. When the patient is diagnosed, I don't think the doctor should immediately suggest suicide as a treatment option. Only when it has become clear that the disease is present and terminal, should assisted suicide be suggested as an alternative to treatment. My two cents and three paragraphs.
Dangit, and the name was so misleading too. Highbrow, who'd have guessed it? |
Paperboy Posts: 29 Joined: 25 Apr 2008 | It's so highbrow it's an ironic avant-garde something something. In all seriousness, LD of morphine wouldn't be a bad way to go, if the alternative was a lifetime of Terri Schiavo-esque paralysis, while in constant pain, unable to communicate one's wishes to the outside world. It's how my grandmother chose to go when the doctors told her her lung cancer was inoperable. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2237 Joined: 21 Jan 2008 | You guys raise some interesting points... But we all know that unless there is true separation between church and state (another topic for another time) there will not being legalised euthanasia. Tis' a shame as well, as people have to die a slow and painful death, just because people believe that it's wrong, without actually experiencing the pain. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2094 Joined: 18 Dec 2007 | I would rather die then live in a vegetative state, I think anyone who is not afraid of death will feel the same but these cards...well there a mockery. They really are. For starters paramedics and doctors are going to have to search a person for the card before they begin surgery. While they are searching for these cards then they are wasting time that could be used to help save the persons life. I am sure that people will die because the paramedic was too busy searching for a card that may or may not exist on the person. There is also a chance that people with these cards could live a normal life after an accident but instead they have chosen to die. I can understand why someone would not want to be in a vegetative state for the rest of their life but why would you risk your life to avoid this state? You can simply ask for the plug to be pulled in your will. Again it makes no sense to have these cards. The article also brings up a good point that people would have these cards as fashion accessories, mostly teenagers will have this without thinking about the negative repercussions. This will also lead to an increase in the amount of lawsuits against doctors and hospitals. If someone is healed despite the fact they want to die you can sue, if someone dies because the doctor can't find a card the person dies. Hell I'm sure one doctor will be sued because let someone die because the card said so. Sorry for that rant like post but I just feel like this card idea is purely stupid and serves no good purpose. |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 808 Joined: 22 Aug 2006 |
All good points, really. If anything, if someone was serious about this, they need to wear a medical bracelet like anyone else who is operating outside the mainstream of healthcare (hemophiliacs, Christian Scientists, etc). That, or get it tattoo'd across you chest. ("Keep those F***ING paddles away!") |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1286 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 | honestly after seeing my grandfather waste away to cancer as a child, he was one of my childhood heroes and i was his partner in crime well at least look out for my grandma, i full support someone's right to end their life early. if you have a fatal disease, be it alzheimers and i agree with Jon Stewart's assessment them going back to some time in the past is a way for the mind to cope with the crap going on, cancer, aids or what ever, you should have the right to say "i don't want to live, i'm dying anyways so kill me now" granted they could find the cure tomorrow but that's doubtful and the doctors would say "hey they are almost finished the cure, hold off for a day or two" because watching a family member waste away is hard to see, especially one you held in high regard when ever i hear someone has terminal cancer i wish them a speedy death. it's not to be cruel, it's to be merciful because it's not something fun to live with or watch someone live thru it |
BANNED  Posts: 502 Joined: 3 Jan 2008 | Holy crap, if someone wants to die let them. If some poor old fart is lying in his bed, slowly dying and he is all like "please kill me" and you don't, than you're a sadisitic asshole (of course, if it's against the law than you can blame the government but still...) User was banned for: Zero Punctuation: Mailbag Showdown. (Permanent) |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 922 Joined: 29 Dec 2007 |
Yeah chop it up next time I like to read more than the next guy, but it hurts my eyes to read computer text for that long. On topic, I think this isn't something you can just give a rule of thumb and be happy with. If somebody lives in total unstoping pain, with no chance of a cure, then let them go, if they wish it, mabey. But nobody should help them. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2237 Joined: 21 Jan 2008 |
Thing is, church calls all non-natural, non-accidental death as murder. And becuase church still influences state, laws say that murder is as bad as suicide. Argh, this is making me mad... |
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7399073.stm
An interesting article I thought. Most of the comments appear in agreement with the idea, some don't obviously.
As for my own thoughts,
1: Is it right to refuse a person the right to die based on mental incapacity? This of course provided this person has expressed such a wish.
And even then, can one come to such a decision about wanting to die and still be deemed fit?
I mean,in the context of say an incurable illness, it seems to me like it should be obvious, allow it, or rather, don't prevent it.
2: In relation to the 'Right to Die' cards themselves, while I agree that there should be something like this that you'd carry around, I also agree with a comment on the article that they really shouldn't be handing them out like that in bars, churches and hospitals etc. It needs some kind of legal contract to go with it. Otherwise it's little more than a useless piece of card imo.
3: Personally, I agree with the concept of suicide in general, and the right to die. Euthanasia not so much, which I think can be used to pressure a patient/patient's family into it when they are unsure. With suicide, regardless of whether I think a person commmiting the act has done so for the wrong reasons, it's still -their- body, not mine or anyone else's. Just as my body is -mine-, and is one I believe of the precious few things in this world that truly are. That is why murder, rape and torture etc. are all the more heinous. And added to this, whereby a person is incapacitated by disease or injury, this I think confers even more of an impetus to chose death over possibly years of pain.
Then again, maybe I'm talking out my backpipe. I'll think on it some more(And fix any spelling ^^').