More than a third of surgeons surveyed in New South Wales, Australia have admitted to giving terminally ill patients high doses of pain killers to hasten their death.The survey, published in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, found that in most cases, patients had not clearly requested euthanasia.
The University of Newcastle survey of 683 surgeons found that 247 (36 percent) of surgeons had given terminally ill patients higher than needed doses of pain relief, such as morphine, to speed up death.
According to Dr Charles Douglas and colleagues who conducted the survey, this amounted to euthanasia, illegal under Australian law.The survey found that only a few of the patients had clearly requested euthanasia.
At least 20% of our entire sample appears to have given drugs With the intention of hastening death in the absence of explicit requested, Dr Douglas said. "The vast majority of patients were only a few hours or days away from their death."
Only 5% of surgeons admitted to giving a patient a single lethal injection in response to an explicit request for assisted death.
Dr Douglas said surgeons who said they had given drugs with an intention to hasten death may in many cases have used pain-killers or sedatives, making it difficult to distinguish their actions from accepted methods of palliative care.It would be almost impossible to tell whether a subsequently died from pain-killers or natural causes.
"The trouble is in Australia we don’t know exactly what the circumstances of the death are because people don’t have immunity to talk about this", he said.
Australian Medical Association vice-president Trevor Mudge said he doubted the surgeons who admitted to hastening a person’s death intended to kill the patient.
"It’s a secondary effect but I don’t think that’s the intention," Dr Mudge said. He said a doctor’s primary intention would always be to relieve pain and suffering.
Daily Telegraph (Australia), 19th November 2001, p.10
CTM Comment: Given that the medical authorities have jurisdiction over their patients, especially in the last weeks of a patient’s life, one is bound to ask, for instance, how many cancer patients could have been saved using proven nutritional methods to combat their condition. If a doctor has failed with a cancer patient and then, according to the above article, moves into a palliative phase of his patient’s treatment, potentially with the aim of providing an early assisted death to end suffering, why are proven nutritional approaches not used, with the patient’s permission, to attempt to recover the latter’s health? These approaches are currently embargoed under existing Australian medical practice.