BMA CONFERENCE: Our function is to treat and comfort. Our function is not to dispose of people, delegates told
By Celia Hall, Medical Editor
BRITAIN'S doctors took a strong stand against euthanasia yesterday, opposing any move to make doctor-assisted suicide legal.
At the British Medical Association annual meeting in Edinburgh, they affirmed their duty to preserve the lives of patients and voted for a motion that the meeting "strongly opposes any changes in law for the time being".
Doctors were told how health organisations in America were already offering to pay for patients' deaths because it was cheaper than funding long-term care.
Dr Sandy Macara, chairman of the BMA, said doctors must reaffirm their obligation to preserve life. "Patients have a right to see us serving life and not embracing death. We should do nothing to betray that trust in our essential and vital function."
Dr Macara said that providing the best care at the end of life was the responsibility of all doctors, not just the hospice movement.
Dr Fay Wilson, a Birmingham GP, told how patients had asked her to end their lives and later thanked her for not doing so. "However much I wanted to help their suffering, I would not do so," she said.
"We are doctors. Our function is to treat and comfort. Our function is not to kill, not to dispose of people."
Dr Fiona Randall, from east Dorset, who specialises in the care of the dying, said that legalised assisted suicide would put pressure on patients to seek their own deaths because they would not want to be a burden on their carers and relatives. It would only add to their anguish, she said.
The debate was set against growing calls for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and the conference accepted that there were different views within the medical professions.
Dr David Brownridge, a GP from Worcester, said a survey of doctors in Worcestershire found that 66 per cent were against changing the law and doing anything that assisted a patient to die.
There was a clear message from the conference that doctors should be working to make sure that patients always received the best palliative medicine.
Dr Jane Orr, a Surrey GP, said doctors were frequently accused of not being compassionate. "But does the patient have to be killed to kill the symptoms? Good palliative medicine and good holistic medicine help people to cope," she said.
"Bad deaths do sometimes still occur but that is due to bad medicine. The answer to bad medicine is not to kill people but to create good medicine." she said.
Dr Michael Stuart, a family doctor from Southend and a founder member of the Association of Palliative Medicine, said: "In 33 years in palliative medicine, I have had a few patients tentatively ask me to finish them off. When I told them what was involved, none followed up that request.
"As a Christian, I am against euthanasia and assisted suicide. To go any way to legalised euthanasia is dangerous, both morally and practically," he said.
Dr Stuart added that when he explained he would need to walk in with a syringe and say that the time had come, patients had second thoughts.
He told of one "terrified" patient given days to live in a general hospital who had been transferred to a hospice and appropriately treated.
The man, who had spinal cancers, had not been able to walk but he left the hospice walking and took his young wife on a holiday before he died at home, months later, of a heart attack.
The debate took place in the week when Gladys Charlton, a character in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside suffering from cancer, was smothered by her daughter and son-in-law because no more could be done to help her pain.
Dr Stuart Horner, chairman of the BMA medical ethics committee, said that the programme had received complaints from angry Liverpool GPs.
"We need to concentrate on improving care. It was a hypothetical scenario that does not exist in practice. It had been based on a false premise, a premise of thoroughly bad GP care," he said.
