As a physician assistant working for the last 46 years, I have spent my life caring for and treating the illnesses of many patients, which included easing their pain, especially when their diseases, or the resulting outcomes, could not be cured.
Like all health care practitioners, I swore an oath to serve as a healer. As a result, if I ever told a patient that, instead of seeking treatment, they should end their life, I would deserve to lose my medical license.
Yet that is exactly what Connecticut legislators are proposing.
Recently, assisted suicide advocates have put forward a new assisted suicide bill for Connecticut. The bill would make it possible for patients to petition the state, through their doctors, for assisted suicide chemicals. Supporters of the bill claim that assisted suicide is necessary to relieve the pain of a small number of people living in Connecticut, but their claims are simply untrue. Assisted suicide is categorically not a necessary step to treat pain, and it will undoubtably not be used by a small number of human beings for that purpose.
My years as a physician assistant, primarily in surgical specialties and critical care, has contributed to my understanding of pain, especially how to treat it. Just as there are numerous conditions which cause pain, there are many ways in which you can ease a patient’s pain—and none of them involve the patient killing themselves, especially with the complicity of a medical professional sworn to preserve life....
The President of the Association of Yorubas in Diaspora, South Africa, Dr Olusola Agbeniyi, has asked the senator representing Edo North, Adams Oshiomhole, to desist from making what he described ...