More on the Assisted Suicide

A blog I regularly read, Firstthings at Secondhandsmoke by Wesley J. Smith always makes me think. I do not agree with Smith all the time but even when I take exception to his words he makes me reconsider my views. For this reason alone, his blog is at the top of my reading list. Smith often effectively takes proponents of assisted suicide to task and yesterday he took exception to a stunning article by Barbara Coombs Lee of Compassion and Choices in the Huffington Post ("Healthcare Reform and the Price of Torture"). Lee's article shocked me. I understand reasoned debate. I understand why some people advocate for assisted suicide. I understand and do not like the fact that some people needlessly suffer at the end of their life. What I do not understand is fear mongering. Lee's article is designed to do generate fear--fear of doctors, fear of dying, fear of hospitals, generate mistrust, and drive a wedge between patient and health care providers. Who then can step in? Compassion and Choices who will lovingly end your life. This is is not helpful, indeed it is counter productive. How disturbing was Lee's article? Judge for yourself as I will quote a single passage that is indicative of the tone of her article:

Lee writes:

"In this country we usually torture people before we allow them to die of whatever is killing them --- cancer, emphysema, the multi-organ failure of diabetes or heart disease.
Like the episodes of military torture from which our nation is recovering, medical torture reflects a culture and a set of assumptions. Reform is not about just identifying a few "bad actors" and weeding them out. Our medical-industrial complex follows a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death as is medically possible. Our broken system rewards that paradigm with fee-for-service payments.
Standard routine is to torture those in the process of dying by inflicting upon them a host of toxic chemicals, invasive machinery and painful surgeries. It's the American way of dying --- agonized and prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones."
It's an American tragedy, really. Every player in the medical-industrial complex is in on it."

The above words by Lee are designed to incite people's rage. No doctor or institution wants patients to suffer much less be tortured to death as Lee maintains. I know this as do most people familiar with hospital settings. In part this is why we have hospice's today--to provide end of life care designed to ease pain and suffering. In this regard, great strides have been made in the last two decades. However, this does not mean people do not suffer at the end of their life. But there are reasons, many complex variables, that go into a death that is difficult and painful. This is a discussion worth having, one that can benefit us all. Thus I find Lee's words extremist. Excellent exceptions exist. For instance, I recently read an outstanding book by Robert Martensen, a physician, historian, and bioethicist. His text, A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era, is must reading for any person about to enter the crucible of the hospital or facing end of life issues. You will find no clear cut answers in Martensen's book just conundrums encountered by patients and physicians that will force you to think about the way we live our lives and the manner in which it ends. I have spent more than a few nights tossing in turning in bed thinking about the issues raised by Martensen. For this, I am grateful to Martensen. In contrast, I am disappointed with Lee and Compassion and Choices. Lee did not make me think, rather she made me wonder why she needed to use such extreme rhetoric designed to generate fear and mistrust. This is not advocacy. This is not nuanced debate. This is not constructive at any level. For me, Lee's article reinforces why the debate associated concerning assisted suicide is so frustrating.