Gosport highlights need to regulate assisted dying
IT IS now over a month since you published a letter from me to Dr Carol Davis (consultant in palliative care), who felt that it was compassionate to refuse the option of assisted dying to a terminally ill person whose distressing symptoms had not been resolved by palliative care.
I asked her: ‘What is the palliative care team’s next step for the dying patient who is still distressed due to disease and there is nothing more left in palliative care’s armamentarium to control the distressing symptoms – i.e. palliative care has failed.’
There has been sufficient time for the opponents of assisted dying who accepted her help in their campaign to make sure that this question got through to her and for her to formulate her reply and have it published in this newspaper.
So far not a peep has been heard from her. I would doubt that there is no set policy or guidelines in her department on what to do when palliative care fails and it would be an educated guess on my part that she does not want to answer my question publicly because that would weaken her case against assisted dying. This is because the only available treatment for unremitting pain (the worst way to die) is to walk the tightrope of giving the patient diamorphine +/- midazolam in sufficient dosage to put them into a drug-induced coma during which they die, either from the disease or from the treatment.
The fact that patients so treated usually die relatively early in this course of treatment betokens the strong suspicion that it is the treatment that ultimately kills them, not the underlying disease.
I have no doubt that to cover themselves against any charge of premeditated murder the medical staff explain to the relatives and hopefully to the patient that it is possible that the drugs may just happen to kill the patient, but by then the patient and relatives are only too keen for the suffering to end to be bothered by such niceties.
This is the same as ‘assisted dying’ but without any legal safeguards to ensure that it is right for the patient, that it is what the patient wants and that it is their decision, rather than it being the doctor ‘playing God’ by making the decision for the patient.
This unregulated form of ‘assisted dying’ has been the practice for at least the last five decades, certainly since I entered the medical profession as a student. Unfortunately, if unregulated it can lead to all sorts of problems, such as has now come to light in Gosport.
TONY LEE,
Les Salines,
Le Vallon,
St Martin’s,
GY4 6DN.