First question to ask your doctor: Are you on my HMO? Second question to ask your doctor: Do you believe in God?
Atheist doctors are almost twice as likely to take decisions that speed up death for very ill patients as those who are deeply religious, research has found.
Those with a strong faith are also less willing to discuss treatments that hasten the end, according to a poll of nearly 4,000 British doctors.
Medics from a wide range of specialities were asked about their religious views, their care for their last patient who died and any decisions they had taken that were expected, or partly intended to, end life.The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, showed that doctors who described themselves as non-religious were more likely than any other group to have given continuous deep sedation until death, having made a decision that they knew could or would end life.
Those who described themselves as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ non-religious were almost twice as likely to have taken these kinds of decisions as those with a strong religious belief.
Note to Dr. Atheist: Your patient may be dying, but they are still in the world.
August 26th, 2010 | 9:31 am
I’ll bet that most of the respondents would never dream of assisting in a state execution of a criminal.
Why is the state killing of someone who was convicted of very serious crimes viewed so morally repulsive while helping the seriously and terminally die acceptable?
What am I missing?
August 26th, 2010 | 10:46 am
The commenters on the Daily Mail site are almost to a person missing the point. They’re all assuming that some kind of “consent” is going on here, and that the opposite situation to what this situation would be, is desperately suffering people begging to be relieved and meeting with stony-hearted zealots.
In reality, at least as the article indicates, there’s no question of consent or desire on the part of the patients. No doubt in some, perhaps most, perhaps nearly all cases, the wishes of the patients are in play, but the article actually *says nothing about that.* Rather it’s about the DOCTORS’ decision making process, which implies that frequently, the decisions are being made when the patient can no longer be in control of his care. I wonder if people really want to defend that?
August 26th, 2010 | 12:14 pm
In reality, at least as the article indicates, there’s no question of consent or desire on the part of the patients.
Actually that’s not clear at all. “Euthanasia legislation” is a rather vague term, and in some European countries includes circumstances when the patient is unable to give consent.
August 26th, 2010 | 2:58 pm
Actually, the study indicates that the very religious are less likely to ask about the end-of-life wishes of the patient:
“…whether they had discussed the medical management of the process of death with their terminally ill patients or their relatives. The study suggested that very religious doctors were about four times less likely than all other doctors (the non-religious or the mildly religious) to have had those discussions… On the basis of what the study actually revealed, a more appropriate headline for the story would have been ‘Religious doctors less likely to ask your opinion on treatment option when you’re terminally ill’”.
August 26th, 2010 | 4:31 pm
What I meant was that the study doesn’t deal with the question of consent, though most of the commenters were assuming that what was in question where strictly situations where, “were it I,” they’d consent. But even those who believe that in some situations they’d want the doctor to “end their suffering” quickly, surely would find some situations where they would not at all wish that to be the case. So the idea of doctors being more or less willing to “take these decisions” has to be considered alongside the question of whether those are the SAME decisions the patients would make, not merely whether the patient would *at certain times* make the same decision.
August 26th, 2010 | 4:34 pm
Ray Ingles points up another issue — the article seems to lump together the idea of doctors “taking certain decisions” and the idea of doctors discussing a greater or smaller range of alternatives with the patients. Only in situations where either it is an emergency, or the patient is incapacitated and has no one to speak for him, should doctors be taking ANY decisions about treatment — they should be advising and recommending. So the whole question of doctors making end of life decisions FOR people, and therefore atheist doctors supposedly being more likely to make death-hastening decisions, is a lot more troubling than what someone might “discuss” or “recommend.”
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