Physician-Assisted Suicide -- Michigan's Temporary Solution

Abstract

Lewis Thomas has noted that doctors “are as frightened and bewildered by the act of death as everyone else”¹. “Death is shocking, dismaying, even terrifying,” Thomas has written. “A dying patient is a kind of freak . . . an offense against nature itself”¹. It is thus not surprising that many physicians have difficulty talking candidly with dying patients and caring for them, a reaction that often results in undermedication for pain and expensive and ineffective overtreatment.American patients know this, and although death is a culture-wide enemy, many Americans fear the process of dying in an impersonal . . .