SOC 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 65: Jack Kevorkian, Pain Management

• School: University of Alabama
• Department: SOC
• Course: SOC 101
• Professor: Chenoia Bryant

Document Summary

Euthanasia: the right to die? term euthanasia as terminally ill patients take more assertive roles in expressing their wishes and requesting physician support. While health and medicine usually look at improving and extending life, increasingly medical professionals and society are being forced to ask how far those efforts should go. Perhaps the most pressing ethical medical dilemma concerns whether an individual has the right to die. Euthanasia, or mercy killing, means the deliberate killing of a patient who is terminally ill. More recently, physician assisted suicide has superseded the diseases like huntington"s disease, alzheimer"s, or the end stages of aids. Those in favor of physician assisted suicide argue that patients remain in control, administer the. Opponents to physician assisted suicide point to several concerns: patients who claim they want physician assisted suicide may be reasoning lethal drugs themselves, and die by choice with limited pain and suffering.