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Modules:
Introduction
1. Advance Care Planning
2. Communicating Bad News
3. Whole Patient Assessment
4. Pain Management
5. Assisted Suicide Debate
6. Anxiety, Delirium
7. Goals of Care
8. Sudden Illness
9. Medical Futility
10. Common Symptoms
11. Withholding Treatment
12. Last Hours of Living
13. Cultural Issues
14. Religion, Spirituality
15. Legal Issues
16. Social and Psychological
More About:
Hospice Care
Clergy and Faith Communities
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Physician Assisted Suicide: A Matter of State Law
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Perhaps no other end-of-life ethical issue has generated as much controversy as physician-assisted suicide
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Ethical and legal consensus that patient refusal of life-sustaining medical treatment is not suicide
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However, provision of medication with intent to produce death is considered to be assisting suicide
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All states except Oregon have laws that make assisting a suicide by anyone (including physicians) a criminal offense
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Recently, some patients and physicians have argued that suicide with the assistance of a physician should be available for
- Patients who have advanced life-threatening illnesses
- Who have decision-making capacity
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In 1997, United States Supreme Court held that there is no federal Constitutional right to assisted suicide
- In doing so, it reaffirmed the distinction between
- Withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment
- Decision leaves open the possibility that state supreme courts will find a state constitutional right, or, more likely, that states will develop a statutory right
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