R J D George

The chameleon of euthanasia continues to change, and the current shade is physician assisted suicide. The politically correct position for clinicians is “studied neutrality” since doctors will not really be involved in assisted suicide. Thus the issue has slipped past the BMA,1 and the recent House of Lords' report on assisted dying suggests that euthanasia and assisted suicide are different.2 This cannot be. What doctor prescribing for assisted suicide would refuse to complete it with euthanasia? In the Netherlands just under one in five physician assisted suicides ends in lethal injection.3 Were physician assisted suicide legalised, doctors would have the new duty of therapeutic killing,4 even if they planned only to prescribe lethal medication. Both are killings justified as treatment, hence we use the term therapeutic killing simply because it describes precisely what is done. Medicine cannot escape; quite aside from patient safety, legalising physician assisted suicide will have a profound and ubiquitous effect on clinical codes, duties, and practice.^w1-w15