Terminally ill patients should be given the option of assisted death

The US national library of medicine did a study on the attitude of terminally ill patients toward euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. In this study they had 70 patients. 32 men and 38 women with a median survival of 44.5 days. 73% of these patients believed that physician assisted suicide should be legalized. The main reasons for choosing this option where pain and their right to choose. As for the pain. Yes it can be managed, but that does not mean the pain will go away. The further into the illness the patient is, the more pain there will be because of the illness spreading and taking over their body. Drugs can only control so much, and a doctor can only give so much medicine before it becomes dangerous. By dangerous I mean too much medicine could cause an overdose, or could cause other side effects such as difficulty breathing which would add more pain for the patient. As for freezing the patient, I am not sure what you mean, but I am going to assume you are talking about cryogenic ally freezing. To be cryogenically frozen the patient must first be pronounced dead. It is illegal to cryogenically freeze someone who is still alive. There are scientist and doctors out there who are always looking for a cure to every known disease out there. however, it takes time to find a cure, and once found it takes an average of 7 years to get the drug into the market. Given how most terminal patients only have 6 months to live, they won't have time to get the drug. Some illnesses do take longer then 6 months to kill, such as aids. However, most patients don't think about ending their suffering, or don't want to end their suffering until it is too much for them to handle. There are certain medical things a doctor looks at to determine the amount of time a terminal patient has left such as how far a cancer has spread and how fast the illness is taking over someone's body. They might not always be accurate, but it is only a guess, which most of the times is pretty accurate. it might not be accurate right down to the last second or minute or hour, but it is close. Selfish is defined as lack of consideration for another. in the case of a person not letting someone make the decision to end their pain is selfish because they are not considering the fact that the person is suffering. With assisted death, the patient can choose when to end their suffering. That would give the patient time to spend with their loved ones and they would know how much time they have left with them. It would also save the patients family from having to watch their loved one suffer in pain. Respect is defined as deep admiration for someone. when you respect the patients decision to end their pain it is not sending a message that their life is less precious than anyone Else's. It is saying that you respect that person's decision. They have a right to say what happens in their life. to say that they don't have a decision is sending a bad message to others. it is kind of like saying you don't think they can make their own decision, as if they were incompetent. Legalizing assisted death would not cause more terminal illnesses. If it is legalized it gives the terminally ill patient more options. It gives them control of the illness. They won't lose respect for themselves because they are given another option. Saying that a terminally ill patient at the end of there life is not the person you once knew is not devaluing the patient. it is simply stating that the person who once was able to run miles without stopping, loved to laugh and hang out with friends, and paint, is no longer able to do that. they lost the things they loved and once looked forward to doing every day. yes they still have their family, but they can't do anything with them like they could before the illness which causes sadness. You would be watching someone who once was happy and always had a smile slowly wither away in the pain into someone unfamiliar to you. Their is nothing to fear but fear itself. so why should someone fear death, and not knowing when they will die? Giving the patient the option to end their pain would put them more at ease and give them time not to fear, or lessen the fear of death. http://zidbits.com... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... http://www.skirsch.com...