Why the Doctors will be Wounded if an Assisted Suicide Bill is Passed

I wrote ten things that will affect the doctor mentality once the assisted suicide bill is passed including the permission to lie, kill, be amoral. I was able to capture it so swiftly and easily to advocate against it, because I know my peers quite well, I know myself, my milieu, I know how very dangerous power can infect a doctor already primed for certain actions. I know the stresses that are in the profession, the high burnout rate, the depression and suicidal ideation that starts even in the young turks, residents and established folks, the closed and tight culture that supports secrecy.

I know that we are gods. Wait, did you say we’re not? Because in our culture, we absolutely are. It is so that in one language the doctors are “diyos” >and their offspring, fellow doctors wannabes for the most part, “anak ng diyos “, spawn of a god. This is the arrogance present in many doctors; it is gagging. I am queen/ king. To play nice is to make the system work for him or her for the betterment of the patient, but peel it and there is inherently a great solid hunk of conviction that they are rockstars and should be treated as such. Bosses, colleagues, men, women—none are immune. It seems necessary for survival; they have to play the success game to make it somewhere, and when they get there, they have to own that space, shape the dialogue, the visual impact so no imperfection becomes glaring. They become essentially control freaks, the best of the best, all this for posturing, because the culture demands it so. This is reflected in medical school applicants—one has to be the top in your Ivy League class, found a nonprofit serving Africa and also be a go-getter in the culture circuit. (This was a real person, my NY roommate, thanks to the support of her dad.)

But the gloss has to be maintained. So what if your marriage is broken but you have the latest car. So what if your child is struggling when you can choose to stay between the house and the boat. Or that your part-time job flies you charter so you can get to your case.

A colleague does’t lift a finger unless he gets $500 for it. A friend charges $5000 flat for one type of procedure, no gratis ever. Another choses his rate as $25000. No money, no hospital entry. Those patients without insurance or charity care access are forever excluded in this set-up.

I know my colleagues work many hours, sacrifice their family life, even faith life (no sabbaths, thus sometimes no sense of God.) One friend died while working, not giving himself a doctor’s appointment when he was feeling rotten. He was in a sense an epitome of what is wrong about medicine. We cannot knock sense into a doctor, even for his own good.

All his family, his colleagues tell him to rest, consider a diagnosis needing workup. But he remained resolutely a doctor. Not that he was caring patients 24/7 though perhaps in his mind, this is where identity and passion and therefore time and attention is held. But he remained too much his own person, intractable, unmovable, recalcitrant. (“I cannot be budged, I am a doctor. I know what to do. I can manage.”)

In refusing to think some lesser minds will hold more reason, he died of a simple, treatable and symptom-shouting-for-days MI. He died of pride. He died from a refusal to accept help, be a smaller person, for once. This is the biggest thing you can ask of a doctor—to not be the person in control.

I attended a health care ethics class which shocked me to find that it is actually the patient, yes, the patient who should call the shots. I agonized, “But, but, we know more, we know the outcomes of each decision/ procedure/diagnostic option better.”

Our technical knowledge maybe high, but it is ultimately the owner of the body and mind whom we are healing that will decide. His own universe will be the determinant, though we can also influence it, for the good, I pray.

But many people do not now what the good is nor pray. Many simply are content to just follow protocols, hash it out per this and that ruling, whether or not is really has evidence.

There was top neurologist calling to implement something for our state because it was what the guidelines asked, but it was essentially non-sensical, an undoing of the basic data capture and therefore tangible help in the ultimate management and outcomes of stroke patients. Simply because some guidelines now advise them to do withhold X, which would put the patient on a 50% chance and had been traditionally done. I would go for a chance of cure if it is not terribly burdensome nor excessive for my capacity, but many are thinking too much like a bureaucrat instead of a physician, controlled as they had been for so many decades by the latter that their thinking is essentially utilitarian.

Sometimes articles/guidelines/ groups have to be checked as to the agenda that they seek. Like the three-year Australian follow-up study of the HPV vaccine that is being used to say the vaccine is clear and ultra-safe to give to whole populations. Who in their right mind will say that a three year longitudinal vaccine study (girls followed from when they were about 12 to when they were 15) is sufficient at any level of medicine? Three years is not even enough for any clinical pharmacology trial that will mine every known side-effect and report it, hopefully with full disclosure.

Who also will agree to the recent W.H.O. designation that all unmarried people meet the definition of ‘infertile’? Simply so IVF can be widely insured! Do they not encounter the numerous IVF-born adults who just suffer mentally and emotionally from this genetic anomie? Would you undo having a mother and father in the context of the family one was born in to have an unknown dad and a surrogate but non-biological mother who will adopt you out if the requesting “parent” finds you less desirable? These MDs claim to be smart, but fit my aunt’s description of “matalinong tanga”, smart fools.

But they have fooled many, sadly. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Make no mistake. You are creating Kevorkians here. Giving the doctor an assisted suicide law will just give permission to everything that is holding him from committing a crime. He already has the prideful, beyond-reproach mindset, something that will even be aided by the immunity afforded at what is typically malpractice/ suicide/murder/ euthanasia. His culture already permits secrecy; state files will further shaped to be unsearchable because the case data is atomized, made granular and separate. The published dataset in the Oregon Heath Department on assisted suicide files is like the tables of immunization side effects managed by the CDC, never a narrative, never even a coherent, connected table. But the greatest threat is the undoing of the doctor himself—he will ultimately cease to value himself as a healer, however tenuous that claim is, because his profession and identity has been appropriated by murderers. It is like the obstetrics profession suddenly taken over by abortionists (in the case of Hackensack Medical Hospital in NJ, only two of the almost 100 OB staff do not do abortions, says a doctor). In another hospital, the department chair required the staff to all be doing abortions. One faith filled woman stuck her ground at the risk of getting fired. Another one, a fellow Catholic, caved in and after his first week of doing abortions, he committed suicide.

In a setting of assisted suicide, the profession will undergo transmogrification. A physician, delicate and fragile though blustery in his ego, will fall apart ultimately if stretched out into the domains so contradictory to what he has invested all his life, money and energy too. It is death to the soul to use your gifts towards the unhealthiest direction that it could possibly take. He will be classed with the Gosnells, Kevorkians, Shipmans, Cullens, mass and serial murderers in healthcare, all without the notoriety, because everyone could be doing it anyway, at least in paper. It is a terrible place that one will be hounded for doing good, standing for the rights of the patient to give the best care, to truly exhibit that humanity in oneself to stand up for the less and the weak and the sick. Wasn’t that what he started out thinking he will do? But his profession got hijacked by those who do not even belong, who do not even have a clue on what it takes to have a good death, for if they spent their whole life helping people to die, it seems that their life—which should be a life with meaning and joy and grace and ultimate ends—had never been discovered at all.