…nization Not Dead Yet in 1996 to oppose physician-assisted suicide. “The only real data is reported by the prescribing doctor; there’s no meaningful oversight.” The American Medical Association has debated the issue in recent years and hasn’t changed its stance: that ultimately, physician-assisted death does more harm than good. “That six months or less is a prognosis,” said Matt Vallière, executive director of the Patients Rights Action Fund, a n…
…the racial disparities in healthcare and how that will make it, unfortunately, more likely that Black disabled will be subject to euthanasia practices, eugenics practices, what we call, futility laws in medicine, medic- medical rationing, you know. As it is, we Black people get inferior healthcare in comparison to whites, and so in my job, I really work to bring awareness of how racism plays a part in disability discrimination in healthcare. Anita…
…y to have seen are similar to those we’ve just described. This is most likely the case for your doctors, family members, and other caregivers, too. While feeling grief or sadness after a new diagnosis is expected, the hope is that you leave that care setting with at least a little bit of hope that you can live a fulfilling life with your disability– but because disabled people are so often portrayed as living tragedies and pity cases, this is unli…
…a salutary effect on another human being. I use the word “hover” deliberately, if a bit provocatively, because that is how families of many brain injury patients viewed it. I know this from interviews with more than 40 families, each with a member who had a disorder of consciousness, who came to Weill Cornell Medical College for enrollment in neuroimaging and EEG studies designed to elucidate mechanisms of recovery. While they were here, we conduc…
…ription (e.g. providing home care to someone who felt like a burden on family members). Finally, as attorney Margaret Dore has pointed out, the law contains no standards that apply at the time the lethal dose is ingested, and the reports contain nothing to address the concern that a third party could administer the drugs without the individual’s consent. Given the documented prevalence in society of elder abuse by family members (see 1998 and 2009…
