A healthier approach to Death with Dignity

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the David Boze Show.

I’m enormously sympathetic to Brittany Maynard and this situation. There’s almost nothing I find more terrifying than the kind of death that she’s describing here.

I watched a love one die of cancer and it just ate away at his ability to move. I don’t talk about it much because I still find it painful to talk about to this day and it’s been 10 years.

But you see somebody who’s healthy and active and suddenly they’re bed-ridden, they can barely move because they’re in this chronic pain. Some cancers are more aggressive and violent towards the body in terms of what they do and the pain they cause. Hers is particularly aggressive and having that described to you as your fate, not only would the eventuality of the pain itself be terrifying but just knowing about it – it’s telling someone they’re going to be tortured for months, but it won’t happen for another six months. During the entire six months, you’re going to be thinking about that. And I get that.

Here’s where I kind of part ways.

I find it a strange argument where right now with pain medications, they say that we have the ability to control most pains, but the focus is ‘well, if we give someone too much pain medication then that’s an act of harm by the physician and that’s an accidental death or a death by pain med and that needs to be treated as a negative. That needs to be treated as a misuse or abuse of pain medication.’

I’ve always thought that instead of focusing on legalizing suicide – because I do think that there will be long-term consequences and the way we think about death and the sanctity of life in that way – it seems like a better approach would be to say if you’re dying of something, if you’re terminal or if you’re in severe pain, and you’re given pain medications until you’re out of pain – even if those medications kill you, that’s death by natural causes.

Basically, the intent is not to kill. The intent is to alleviate the pain. The intent would be to end that kind of suffering, not to kill. I think that kind of covers both directions.

Right now, for example, in Washington state, we changed some of the rules on pain medications and I know some people who are on fixed income and in assisted living places and now, I guess you have to go to a pain specialist before you can get your prescription filled. So that creates regularity with a specialist. The powers that be thought ‘what we have to do is solve this pain med abuse problem,’ but is what they did is cause other problems and it’s a financial hardship on people who already had issues, who were on a fixed incomes and just want to be able to refill the prescription that they already had. That’s just foolishness.

So it seems like a healthy approach to quit worrying about if there’s someone with a chronic pain condition that is unmanageable or is too brutal and requires dangerous amounts of medications to reduce the pain – to not worry so much about the possibility of overdose.

If they die from it, they die from it. Right? As long as they know. They’re informed that ‘hey, we’re going to keep giving this to you until you’re comfortable, but it might kill you.’ For the terminally ill, I’m pretty sure that frequently that won’t be their number one concern.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the David Boze Show.

SK