Back to top On Pain Pain and other symptoms of discomfort associated with terminal illness can always be alleviated. The notion that some physical pain associated with dying can not be made more tolerable is simply untrue. Most pain associated with cancer or other incurable illness yields to straightforward treatment. At times, pain or other distressing symptoms prove difficult to treat and absolute comfort can not be achieved, but it is always possible to make symptoms more tolerable. The concept of uncontrollable pain is self-fulfilling.
Pain only becomes unmanageable when the clinicians involved give up.
Although I realize that the world in which we live is real, and therefore imperfect, as a physician I consciously adopt the attitude that there is no such thing as uncontrollable pain, only pain that has yet to be controlled. My focus is in reducing the conditions that make PAS seem an attractive alternative to patients facing the prospect of living with an incurable illness and to society struggling to care for the dying. Success will not come with making assisted suicide and euthanasia legal, but rather with making them unnecessary. In the very rare situations in which physical distress is extreme it is always possible to provide comfort through sedation. The difference between what I do and euthanasia is that palliative care does whatever is necessary to alleviate the suffering while euthanasia is focused on eliminating the sufferer.