Terminally ill must have right to choose

摘要

The case argued in my Broad spectrum article (PJ, 8 March, p272) is not based on a single emotive experience, as one correspondent seems to suggest (PJ, 12 April, p438); I have written about these issues in the national press, and spoken about them at meetings and on television, long before that. It is based on a lifetime of experience in the only profession — veterinary medicine — which, in the UK, has experience of having assisted closure as an option for the relief of irreversible suffering. My experience of nursing a dying human patient reinforced, all too vividly, the fact that pain and suffering can reach beyond the power of even the finest palliative care.