Industry | 2010.01.01
Doctor backs euthanasia law change
Ann McPherson, author of Teenage Health Freak, says assisted dying should be option within palliative care
One of the UK\'s leading doctors is calling for a change in the law to allow those who are terminally ill to get medical help in the UK if they want to end their life.
Ann McPherson, the co-author of the best-selling Diary of a Teenage Health Freak and medical director of an award-winning website of patient experiences, is herself dying of pancreatic cancer.
McPherson, who was a GP in Oxford for 40 years, says that those who are terminally ill should be able to turn to their doctor for help in dying in the manner and place of their choosing. But the law presently bars doctors from helping, meaning that people with terminal illnesses sometimes go to the assisted dying organisation Dignitas, in Switzerland, earlier than they would like in order to ensure they are still fit enough to make the journey.
McPherson supports assisted dying for those who are terminally ill and is very clear that she is not talking about people who want to end their lives for any other reason. "It ought to be an option," she said. "It is part of good palliative care and it shouldn\'t be seen as something that people want when palliative care fails. For myself, I\'m not sure whether I will or won\'t want it, but I would feel much happier knowing that it was there, if the time came when I didn\'t want to live any more."
Fifteen years ago McPherson was treated for breast cancer. Three years ago she was found to have pancreatic cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of 4%. She had surgery, but in May last year tests confirmed the cancer had returned.
In the bright flower-filled conservatory of her house in north Oxford, strewn with children\'s books and pictures and an odd copy of Advanced Knowledge in Analgesia, she said she was surprised still to "be here". She has much to live for, with a rewarding and very successful career, children and grandchildren. But she knows there can come a time for the terminally ill when the physical or mental distress becomes too much to bear.
During her career spanning four decades she has been asked to help patients die. "You can\'t act illegally," she said. "There is the double way in which morphine obviously helps not only to ease pain but in some circumstances can shorten life, so one is able to help to a certain extent. But one does feel that as a doctor you have to work within the law.
"But I think many doctors will feel that they have perhaps hastened someone\'s death. Yes, I\'m sure I have. With the request of the patient. But is that assisted dying? Probably not. Is that euthanasia? Probably not. I see it as good care, really."
She is a great supporter of palliative care, but does not believe that it always removes the need for assisted dying. "You can be pain-free and have very good palliative care and I\'ve certainly had patients in that position but still [not liking] to continue to live any more."
Doctors have traditionally opposed assisted dying on the grounds that their business is the preservation of life. The British Medical Association has regularly debated the issue and takes a stand against it. Polls have shown that the public, on the other hand, is in favour.
A survey of MPs last month conducted by Dignity in Dying found that 53% did not think doctors should be prosecuted for helping a terminally ill, mentally fit, person to die.
McPherson leafed through a large bundle of supportive emails she has had from doctors, many of them eminent, since writing about her views in the British Medical Journal recently. She does not believe the BMA\'s position, voted through at its annual general meeting, is representative. "I think if you are going to do that you ought to do the whole membership of the BMA," she said. "It\'s interesting that the nurses have come out not against it, but neutral." Assisted dying, as she sees it, is good medicine rather than any contravention of the Hippocratic oath.
Views within the medical profession may be shifting, or at least they are being more openly discussed. In its latest editorial, the British Journal of General Practice calls for doctors to reconsider their stance for the sake of their dying patients.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/j[...]r-mcpherson-law-terminally-die
