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by tomohawk
1287 days ago
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While this is likely not due to an official policy, it is certainly due to a conflict of interest. Medical personnel should not be involved in euthanasia. While they have the requisite medical knowledge, medicine should be about saving lives, or at least palliative care. Euthanists should be a separate thing, if they exist at all. Euthanasia is about death, not life. No one should go to the doctor for medical care and be provided death. Such a situation destroys trust. |
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Speaking as an American who's talked to a lot of Canadians and made many trips there, one issue is that pallative care can bleed into euthanasia due to tolerances around opiates... what happens when you give someone enough medication to cure their pain, and they overdose? Or if you give them enough in a bottle to do so on their own? That's how you get to a point that people are handed nothing but Tylenol and an offer of a suicide booth or whatever... that is.
Then again, to reiterate: I'm not Canadian, I'm American, so I can only comment on my own experiences.
For example, after I tried pretty much every antidepressant on the market, my psychiatrist told me my depression was not chemical based but a rightful reaction to life's circumstances, that I had CPTSD on top of my autism from the previous interventions I'd had tried (some of which I detailed in an anonymous essay that triggered a congressional investigation), gave me a reoccurring prescription for alaprazolam and suggested I take up a sport like target shooting or basket weaving.
Apparently it scared folks when my response to the above was to go down to the gun range adjacent to the local military base, rent a handgun, and practiced unloading the clip into a target at twenty yards like I'd done back on Pearl Harbor day in high school with my dad.
The woman working the range kind of narrowed her eyes when she saw my ID.
"Bloomington? Have you even shot a gun before" she rightfully asked. (I suspect they had people show up and try to shoot their nine like a rap video and have to be removed from the range -- part of why I never bought one in 412 is the range nearest me had no rangemaster and had issues with folks who wouldn't follow the four rules... and might follow you to your car if you asked them to.)
"Oh yes. I've shot a bolt action twenty two, a 357 magnum, and a Colt 1911. The last two are too much kick, do you have anything in the forty caliber range, and can you show me the safety -- I've only shot an automatic one."
Around the same time they'd threatened to cancel the undergrad's paper if they reported on a string of suicides, and I later found out there were some severe sexual assault issues where kids who were on athletic scholarships were straight up told they had to go through the informal judicial process if they wanted to continue playing the sport that paid for their education.
The above is why I originally worked hard to attend a school that doesn't have a strong athletics program instead of where I ended up doing my aborted PhD, and why I think sports should be separate from the university as is done in the EU, UK, and many other more functional democracies, why I believe in a personal right to firearms ownership, and why I worry greatly about so called democracies that institute things like universal health care without respecting responsible firearms ownership... it creates a lot of issues when you disarm people, abuse them, then tell them suicide is an option. They might decide to not just kill themselves.
In fact, I suspect that meta level thought pattern: "Why would I end my life, instead of the abuser making me suicidal" is the source of many of the lower body count spree killings you see in the media. (The ones where they stop after a clip rather than try to make it into the record books -- the latter types should not have their names repeated when possible.)