It is true that many doctors fail to respond to the pain and depression of their dying patients, for which they have no excuse. Current pain management techniques offer physicians a variety of tools to control most forms of pain. Research continues to provide ever more effective methods. The hospice movement has demonstrated that pain can be managed without massive doses of narcotics. Appropriately applied modern pain management principles, using both drug and non-drug therapies, will control the pain of 99 percent of patients.
Treatments already exist to care for the few whose pain continues.
These methods may render the patient unconscious but they are effective and legal. Consequently, it is not simplistic to say that if a person experiences the kind of pain most people believe justifies mercy killing his or her physician is guilty of medical malpractice. Some advocates argue that if assisted suicide remains a criminal offense, physicians will be reluctant to administer pain medication in large enough doses for fear of suppressing a patient's respiration and hastening death, even when death is not intended. They contend that de facto euthanasia is routinely practiced by physicians who knowingly administer such doses. They say this predicament makes legalization necessary, since the death of any person within a hospital or long term care facility forces an investigation into possible criminal actions on the part of caregivers.