PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

How will the end come? Effects of a physician-assisted suicide law

Oregon made it legal in 1997, but the U.S. Justice Dept. still pushes to take action against physicians who assist suicide. Two terminally ill patients and their doctors (one who supports assisted suicide and one who opposes the concept) relate how the law has affected them.

Ken Stevens, MD, and Mary Morrison: It's not compassionate.
Keith White, MD, and Tom Creelan: The option can be comforting.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. Aug. 12, 2002.

Some doctors in Oregon may think offering to assist in a terminally ill patient's suicide is a sign of compassion. Ken Stevens, MD, is not one of them.

Twenty years ago, his first wife was dying of cancer. She asked her doctor if there was anything more he could do. In response, he offered to prescribe an extra-large dose of pain killers.

"When we walked out the door, she said, 'He wants me to kill myself,' " Dr. Stevens recalled. "It was very devastating to have her physician say, very subtly, that her life wasn't worth living."

Shannon Stevens died June 1, on their oldest child's 17th birthday.

"That really sensitized me to how patients and families feel," he said. "It made me realize how much patients and their families depend on having trust in doctors, and assisted suicide really puts that to the test."

A Portland-based oncologist, Dr. Stevens aims in his practice to offer hope as well as comfort. He admits he wasn't always good with the latter.

"I learned by experience," he said. "When I was a resident, I saw a patient who had advanced lung cancer and he asked, 'What could possibly happen to me?' " The young Dr. Stevens told the man how the cancer could spread to his brain, then his bones and then his liver.

"He said, 'If all that's going to happen, I might as well go out and shoot myself,' " Dr. Stevens said. "I realized I had said the wrong things. Now I ask, 'What have you been told and what more do you need to know?' That way, I follow the lead of the patient." [...]

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