Gloria C. Phares, 93, has Atrial fibrillation. She cannot hear people talking to her, much less can she enjoy music. She also has a fractured thigh, which has constrained her to a wheelchair. To top it all off, her husband recently died. Phares no longer wants to live. What she does want, however, is a dignified way out and an end to the pain. Modern medicine has allowed her to live this long, but she no longer sees a point to living a decrepit live where enduring the basic tribulations of life besets her with a new spectrum of punishment. (NYTimes) Modern medicine should entitle her to end what modern medicine has allowed. The purpose of medicine is to alleviate pain, offering it’s consumers a right to end their suffering.
	Death is not rock bottom. Certain untreatable medical conditions are so intolerable and so excruciating that their victims jettison any will to live. A death worse than death, this relinquishment of will is a nihilistic abandonment of any remaining sanctity to the patient’s life; a Physician Assisted Suicide is not a disrespectful overturning of the life endowed to us by God, Evolution, or otherwise, but rather liberation from a life not worth living. If one feels that the purpose of medicine is to mandate the prolonging of life indefinitely, then this is a request for the prolonged suffering for those outlined previously. Physician Assisted Suicide is indeed banned in the Hippocratic Oath, “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan;” (NLM). While the guidelines of this doctrine seek to preach a morally upstanding Physician, at what point does society evolve past this ancient document? In the time of the Greeks, humans were not living past their forties, and thus not exposed a new swath of viral maladies. The time is now to forego tradition for the sake of placing control of a patient’s life back in their own hands; that is paramount to a sanctified life. The ability to choose one’s own fate restores one’s own jouissance; the cognitive dissonance introduced by the choice between life and death, regardless of the resulting decision, is a right of the patient, not of the spectators. The much lauded alternative, a rejection of this right, is often defended because the ends justify the means, as suicide is often viewed as the ultimate disavowal of what it means to life. While the attempted protection of a life is commendable, we must be sure to guarantee that in doing so we do not overlook those who’s lives have been reduced to nothing more than a heartbeat.