Unfortunately, it is your time to die. Clinicians need to recognize that requests to accelerate death are often cries for more help, not genuine requests to end life. Physicians who fail to provide appropriate medical treatment to critically ill patients might face professional or legal sanctions. Just when this point is reached is a matter of clinical judgment that is made more difficult because of the new technology of medicine. Clinicians, patients, and families can, unfortunately, sometimes collude in overtreatment.
Decision making at the end of life is difficult and unlikely to get easier.
But maybe that is how it should be. If decisions to limit care or to allow patients to die were ever to become easy or routine, we should all worry about medicine. This statement does not, and cannot, resolve the ethical debate over whether assisted suicide and active euthanasia could ever be a morally appropriate response to suffering. Oregon has legalized physician-assisted suicide and some empirical data are available on that experience. That article joins an already rich literature on medical practices and attitudes in various countries regarding physician-assisted suicide.