Oregon physician-assisted suicides reach new high number

A record 46 terminally ill Oregonians took the lethal prescriptions their doctors wrote them to end their lives in 2006, up from 38 in 2005, said the Oregon Dept. of Human Services.

The previous single-year record was 42 in 2003, and 292 physician-assisted suicides have taken place since the first such death in 1998.

The ninth annual report on how the state's Death With Dignity Act is used also disclosed that 40 different doctors wrote 65 lethal prescriptions in 2006, one more than in 2005.

Last fall, the Oregon Dept. of Human Services said it no longer would use the term physician-assisted suicide to refer to how patients end their lives under the terms of Oregon's law. Instead, the department uses the term "persons who use the Oregon Death with Dignity Act."

In November 2006, the American Public Health Assn. adopted policy stating that the "the term 'suicide' or 'assisted suicide' is inappropriate when discussing the choice of a mentally competent terminally ill patient to seek medications that he or she could consume to bring about a peaceful and dignified death," and that physicians and other health professionals should use more "neutral" language such as "aid in dying" or "patient-directed dying."

In February, an American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine position statement on how to evaluate patient requests for lethal prescriptions consistently used the term "physician-assisted death." Opponents of the practice say the new language is an attempt to avert most people's negative judgments about suicide. AMA delegates have on multiple occasions passed policy stating that physician-assisted suicide is "fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's role as healer."

Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/03/26/prbf0326.htm.