The Most Difficult Kind of Conflict to Resolve is Conflict of Conscience
To the doctrine head office (date 12/11/2011)
I Philip Nitschke have a proposition to request, that I believe should be supported by the doctor’s authority in this scenario. Recently a patient I was examining due to a painful joint in the right shoulder, a lovely man who is aged in his 80s, I had to find the upmost courage to tell this old, selfless man that he was going to die, and no time limit was known when he would pass. It could be a matter of weeks, months or years but knowing you have ticking time bomb of death, but never knowing when his was going to explode.
The matter of telling this man the cancer was terminal, was utterly gut wrenching, the hardest thing to tell any patient is that they are going to die and we doctors cannot do anything to fix it…
The response I got from the elderly male was somewhat surprising, there was no negative emotion aside from the pain and fear he will suffer. many weeks after the diagnosis the elderly male wasn’t heard from, as a doctor I was expecting the worst had happened, however after a couple of days he came into my office and asked me the question of whether I would euthanize his own life.
The man told me that his life was not worth living, all the pain and suffering was for no one, his wife passed away, he has no immediate family and he said there were days that the pain was so unbearable that he couldn’t even move. The man decision was very much inevitable and he just wanted the little white pill, there was no doubt in my mind as a professional he was in a right state of mind and his decision was final.
After a couple of days processing the information and what it meant as a doctor to end a human beings life was a constant mind game, I couldn’t interpret if it was the right or wrong thing to do. Follow my oath as a doctor or fulfil the final wishes of a dying man.
This decision was intensively thought about and I would like the board to obey and respect this dying man’s last wish. The law constraints on
I Philip Nitschke have a proposition to request, that I believe should be supported by the doctor’s authority in this scenario. Recently a patient I was examining due to a painful joint in the right shoulder, a lovely man who is aged in his 80s, I had to find the upmost courage to tell this old, selfless man that he was going to die, and no time limit was known when he would pass. It could be a matter of weeks, months or years but knowing you have ticking time bomb of death, but never knowing when his was going to explode.
The matter of telling this man the cancer was terminal, was utterly gut wrenching, the hardest thing to tell any patient is that they are going to die and we doctors cannot do anything to fix it…
The response I got from the elderly male was somewhat surprising, there was no negative emotion aside from the pain and fear he will suffer. many weeks after the diagnosis the elderly male wasn’t heard from, as a doctor I was expecting the worst had happened, however after a couple of days he came into my office and asked me the question of whether I would euthanize his own life.
The man told me that his life was not worth living, all the pain and suffering was for no one, his wife passed away, he has no immediate family and he said there were days that the pain was so unbearable that he couldn’t even move. The man decision was very much inevitable and he just wanted the little white pill, there was no doubt in my mind as a professional he was in a right state of mind and his decision was final.
After a couple of days processing the information and what it meant as a doctor to end a human beings life was a constant mind game, I couldn’t interpret if it was the right or wrong thing to do. Follow my oath as a doctor or fulfil the final wishes of a dying man.
This decision was intensively thought about and I would like the board to obey and respect this dying man’s last wish. The law constraints on