Some years back, Meier saw the light and wrote a piece in the New York Times reversing herself on assisted suicide, and while she is not an activist in the sense that I am against that doctor prescribed death agenda, she tells it like it is when asked. Apparently she was the key presenter at a palliative care conference and was asked about assisted suicide. From the transcript:
Questioner: If we had a fully implemented palliative care model in this country, working as we think it should be working. . .Is there a need for policies . . . such as “Death with Dignity”? Is there a correlation or relationship between those two, – some people would say, you don’t need Death with Dignity if you have a good palliative care model. I was curious as to your thoughts on that.
Dr. Diane Meier: I, as a young person, was strongly in favor of legalization of assisted suicide. I think I was somewhat naïve at the time, you know, kind of doctrinaire about my commitment to patient self-determination and patient autonomy. And as I got a bit older and had more experience taking care of patients and families, and realizing that autonomy was not really relevant to the human condition – We are all parts of families and parts of communities and critically dependent on one another in ways that notions of self-determination and autonomy pretend don’t exist…
This is an important point. Often assisted suicide advocates act as if a suffering and despairing person can cooly and rationally choose doctor prescribed death as they might choose between a Dell or an Apple computer. But it isn’t like that. These are very emotional times, with ups and downs, ins and outs, and around and throughs. Moreover, what our decisions are not taken in a vacuum. They impact others, who the suicidal person may not even know, and the views of others–particularly family and doctors–can exert a huge influence on the patient.
Later, Meier continues:
I don’t know how many of you saw the Bill Moyer’s series “On Our Own Terms: Dying in America”? I don’t know if you remember that patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease whose wife was taking care of him and Moyers went back repeatedly, and the first time he said, “Well, if I’m in a wheelchair all the time, that’s it, I’m outta here.” So, Moyers goes back six months later, he’s fulltime in a wheelchair, he can’t do anything for himself, and, “It’s okay.” Then he says, “Well, if I have to get to a point where my wife has to change me and bathe me and I can’t take care of my own business, I’m outta here.” He goes back six months later, that’s exactly what he needs and life is still worth living. Because people adjust, people are remarkably resilient. And life is precious, and your vision of what’s worth tolerating changes.
Yes, people adjust. People may want to die today, next week, or next month. But they often change their minds–as my last hospice patient Bob Salamanca did during his struggle with ALS But if they get the pills before that, if they take prescribed suicide before they “come out of the fog” in the once suicidal Bob’s words, those who helped will have cheated the patient out of that continuing life that would have been, as applaud themselves for being “compassionate.” Back to Meier:
And legalization of physician assisted suicide in a society like ours, which is entirely driven by overwhelmed, overextended doctors chasing the dollar, is pretty scary – because the patients who might opt for this are the ones who really need thoughtful, extended conversations about what is motivating you to want to die at this point, and the differential diagnosis is long. And I can promise you that the overwhelming majority of doctors have neither the training nor the time to engage in that kind of careful discussion with seriously ill patients. And I do believe that real access to palliative care that is timely, that is high quality, would essentially eliminate the need for that and the fear that drives people to vote for these ballot measures.
Which is why in Oregon, most assisted suicides are facilitated by Compassion and Choices, and many doctors have known their “patients” for two weeks or less before death. It is ideological, not medical. Assisted suicide is bad medicine and even worse public policy.
April 8th, 2011 | 5:28 pm
“Autonomy [is] not really relevant to the human condition.” What a bracing statement!–literally false, but deeply true when understood in its intended context: “We are all parts of families and parts of communities and critically dependent on one another in ways that notions of self-determination and autonomy pretend don’t exist.” Thanks for sharing this, Wesley, and kudos to Dr. Meier for the courage of public reconsideration.
April 8th, 2011 | 10:39 pm
[...] Assisted Suicide Ex Proponent, Dr. Diane Meier, Speaks WisdomFirst Things (blog)Dr. Diane Meier was once a vocal proponent of assisted suicide. She is one of the nation's top palliative care experts–along with Dr. Kathleen Foley. Here are her credentials: she was a winner of a McArthur (genius) Fellowship and Director of the … [...]
April 8th, 2011 | 10:49 pm
Three cheers for Dr. Meier! Well said.
April 9th, 2011 | 6:30 am
Is Dr. Meier collectivist enough to mandate blood and organ donations for all viablw donors?
If not, why not?
April 9th, 2011 | 6:12 pm
Dr. Meier makes good points in advocating for maximum availability of palliative care and for there being a very careful process in allowing suffering patients the choice of voluntary death. But for her, in the final analysis, to substitute her judgement for that of the person whose life is at stake, simply can’t be defended. The choice is not and should not be hers, or the government’s or anyone else’s.
Nor does making such choices illegal mean that the problem goes away. It just goes underground instead, with less regulation and more desperation for all concerned. For a close-up look at just this situation, see my new novel What You Wish For, which illustrates it in a contemporary California context, where we too lack a compassionate legal alternative.
HCM Reply:
April 10th, 2011 at 4:21 am
@Bill Pieper, Bill: You’re exactly on the ball there. :)
The updated, more modern Hippocratic Oath mentioned recently by Wesley exemplifies this. Why should doctors and moralists (who aren’t suffering unbearably) get to decide for the rest of us?
April 9th, 2011 | 8:05 pm
I’ve often thought that unless we truly know the meaning of life, every second of it–even if painful, we cannot know the cost of ending it.
Of course, we don’t want a person to suffer horrible pain during their last phase of life, but (this may sound heartless) isn’t that a blink of an eye in the face of all the days of a whole life or in the face of eternity? What if there is unseen merit in the patient going through what they are going through? What if there are still gifts to be had?
We are more than our flesh and physiology, but proponents of assisted suicide seem to assume that we are only that.
I applaud Dr. Meier’s turnaround.
HCM Reply:
April 10th, 2011 at 4:21 am
@Judy, To hell with such “merit.” You don’t get to decide how anyone except yourself gets to meet the Reaper.
End of story.
Dblade Reply:
April 10th, 2011 at 11:22 am
@HCM,
that’s stupid. We decide all the time. Suppose your kid tells you he is going to commit suicide, and pulls out a revolver. You sure as hell will decide for him not to meet the reaper despite him wanting to.
This despite the fact that he has just as every right to end his life. the key factor here seems to be whether or not OTHER people think it’s a waste.
What a lot of the assisted suicide people think is that a life of slow degeneration and pain is something to end, and any form of treatable pain (like depression, or despair) isn’t. But in both cases the person very much wants to end it. One is stopped, the other isn’t.
HCM Reply:
April 10th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
@Dblade, So we should intervene in every suicide attempt? I’m sure there are situations where you yourself would prefer a quick exit to a slow and painful one.
I for one do not trust palliative sedation; that is too dependent on human error. And I would have no control over that process.
If you think that all suicides are irrational, then please, apply for and win a Nobel Prize.
April 11th, 2011 | 6:49 am
that’s stupid. We decide all the time. Suppose your kid tells you he is going to commit suicide, and pulls out a revolver. You sure as hell will decide for him not to meet the reaper despite him wanting to.
Still waiting for someone to define exactly where the line is to be drawn – based on what criteria – between those whose suicides are clearly to be responded to with intervention & treatment, vs. those whose suicides are to be encouraged with a hearty, “heck yeah, you really are worthless! Here, let me help!”
Because I’m still interested in whether we will be creating a class of people whose lives will be deemed worthless.
If we set the dividing line at X point (say X = doctor says “only one year to live”, or X = a condition too expensive to treat, or X = a particular type of decline), then what happens to the patient who is or experiences X but does not want to die?
HCM Reply:
April 12th, 2011 at 6:15 am
@Blake, My criteria are very simple: informed consent and irremediable suffering.
And I would appreciate it if you toned down the barely-veiled insults in future.
April 11th, 2011 | 12:42 pm
[...] Taking note of a doctor who naively started her career as a proponent of assisted suicide, but who changed her mind after [...]
April 18th, 2011 | 5:18 pm
In a way this is all a moot point anyway. Any sick person can heal and so rather than worrying about how to die, these people should be spending their time learning to heal.
The idea that someone is going to necessarily die as an illness progresses is incorrect and falling for that line of thinking seems to be a key part of the foundation of the pro assisted suicide movement. So the whole thing is to a large degree based on nonsense.
April 30th, 2011 | 10:52 am
Life is an emotional time with ups and downs. We should never be allowed to make any decisions. Computers should take our choices from us. Only a computer can be rational enough to make decisions of any sort.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact