Editorials are surely meant to provide balanced, dispassionately presented information. The editorial by Hotopf et at, while implying by its title that it is impartial on the issue of assisted suicide, is, in fact, highly tendentious in its approach and selective in the information it provides. The authors first fail to draw an important distinction between 'assisted dying' and 'assisted suicide'. The former term is now widely used to describe the situation that pertains in Oregon, where terminally ill, mentally competent patients who are suffering intolerably despite the best available palliative care, have the right to ask their physicians to provide them with the wherewithal to end their lives. The term 'assisted suicide' tends to be used where patients are given the means to end their lives, although they are not terminally ill. They might, for example, be paraplegic or in the early or intermediate stages of a chronic degenerative neurological disorder. Dignity in Dying, of which I am a Board member, supports assisted dying but not assisted suicide.
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