ArticleJournal of medical ethics2005
The acceptability of ending a patient's life.
Article in Journal of medical ethics, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Euthanasia in Syria: an examination of medical student attitudes and predictors in a conflict zone.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- [Limits of pain treatment: medical and judicial aspects].Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2011Review
- The acceptability among lay persons and health professionals of actively ending the lives of damaged newborns.Monash bioethics review · 2010Article
- The role of nurses in physician-assisted deaths in Belgium.CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l'Association medicale canadienne · 2010Article
- A role for judges in assisted dying.Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine · 2009Article
- Clinical ethical dilemmas: convergent and divergent views of two scholarly communities.Journal of medical ethics · 2006Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo clarify how lay people and health professionals judge the acceptability of ending the life of a terminally ill patient.
designParticipants judged this acceptability in a set of 16 scenarios that combined four factors: the identity of the actor (patient or physician), the patient's statement or not of a desire to have his life ended, the nature of the action as relatively active (injecting a toxin) or passive (disconnecting life support), and the type of suffering (intractable physical pain, complete dependence, or severe psychiatric illness).
participants115 lay people and 72 health professionals (22 nurse's aides, 44 nurses, six physicians) in Toulouse, France. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: Mean acceptability ratings for each scenario for each group.
resultsLife ending interventions are more acceptable to lay people than to the health professionals. For both, acceptability is highest for intractable physical suffering; is higher when patients end their own lives than when physicians do so; and, when physicians are the actors, is higher when patients have expressed a desire to die (voluntary euthanasia) than when they have not (involuntary euthanasia). In contrast, when patients perform the action, acceptability for the lay people and nurse's aides does not depend on whether the patient has expressed a desire to die, while for the nurses and physicians unassisted suicide is more acceptable than physician assisted suicide.
conclusionsLay participants judge the acceptability of life ending actions in largely the same way as do healthcare professionals.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.