"Doctors don't kill patients."

Len Doyal, Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, is the British non-physician "ethicist" who claims that doctors should have the legal right to intentionally and purposefully act to kill their patients, even without consent. The paper, titled "Dignity in dying should include the legalization of non-voluntary euthanasia," was published as a "Guest Editorial" in the second issue of the Royal Society of Medicine's Clinical Ethics. It is available for free in pdf form, at the link "PDF" at the bottom of this page.

Doyal claims that the act of injecting a drug that is meant to kill is the same thing as withdrawing or withholding medical interventions. Unfortunately, many other people, both pro-life and not, believe the same thing.

However, the doctrine of double effect is a time honored way of determining whether or not a procedure that carries a risk of leading to death is ethical. There is, indeed, a difference between withholding the placement of an IV into a vein for artificial feedings while continuing to give ice chips and fluids as tolerated by mouth and using that IV to administer drugs that are intended to cause death. The latter is never a medical treatment and is always unethical. The former should only be done with consent or with the knowledge that the treatment will cause more harm than good.

Under the heading, "The Ethics of Euthanasia," the Times Guardian has published an excellent rebuttal by Professor Jeffrey Tobias,
Professor of cancer medicine, University College London Hospitals, to the UK "ethicist" who has called for legalized euthanasia - with or without consent - of patients by their doctors.

" To argue that there is no real distinction between "the disease that does the dirty work" and the clinician's active decision to terminate life by euthanasia is to profoundly miss the point.


"Doctors don't kill patients. It is exceptionally unusual for life to continue in an extended and distressing way once a medical decision has been made to discontinue support - a decision always taken with the patient's or family's consent. I would go further and argue that this is precisely the reason why clinicians become so irritated with so-called ethicists like Professor Doyal who, by and large, have no medical qualification and no direct experience of the burdens, challenges and privileges of clinical responsibility, but none the less adopt the moral high ground. Of course the euthanasia debate will continue, but to suggest that there are occasions where this could be done without consent speaks of breathtaking arrogance."

Bravo, Professor Tobias!