ReviewJournal of general internal medicine2018
Physician-Assisted Suicide: Why Neutrality by Organized Medicine Is Neither Neutral Nor Appropriate.
Review in Journal of general internal medicine, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Knowledge of and Preferences for Medical Aid in Dying.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Disability, Offense, and the Expressivist Objection to Medical Aid in Dying.The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2024Article
- Policies and cost analyses of voluntary assisted dying (VAD) laws - a mapping review & analysis.Health economics review · 2024Article
- Medically Assisted Death and the Ends of Medicine.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2024Article
- Should Physician-Assisted Suicide or Euthanasia be Legalized in the United States? A Medically Informed Perspective.Journal of religion and health · 2024Review
- Conventional and assisted suicide in Switzerland: Insights into a divergent development based on cancer-associated self-initiated deaths.Cancer medicine · 2023Article
- Assessment of Oncology Advanced Practice Professional Willingness to Participate in Medical Aid in Dying.JAMA network open · 2022Article
- Physician-Patient Relationship, Assisted Suicide and the Italian Constitutional Court.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2021Article
- The intractable problems with brain death and possible solutions.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2021Review
- The Ethics of Dying: Deciphering Pandemic-Resultant Pressures That Influence Elderly Patients' Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Decisions.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Physician-Assisted Suicide in Dementia: Paradoxes, Pitfalls and the Need for Prudence.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Review
- Letter to the Editor in Response to: Clayville K, Miller P. Sulmasy, et al.: Physician-Assisted Suicide: Against Medical Neutrality.Journal of general internal medicine · 2020Article
- Article
- Eight things we would never do regarding end-of-life care in the ICU.Intensive care medicine · 2019Article
- Can Growing Popular Support for Physician-Assisted Death Motivate Organized Medicine to Improve End-of-Life Care?Journal of general internal medicine · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been proposed that medical organizations adopt neutrality with respect to physician-assisted suicide (PAS), given that the practice is legal in some jurisdictions and that membership is divided. We review developments in end-of-life care and the role of medical organizations with respect to the legalization of PAS since the 1990s. We argue that moving from opposition to neutrality is not ethically neutral, but a substantive shift from prohibited to optional. We argue that medical organizations already oppose many practices that are legal in many jurisdictions, and that unanimity among membership has not been required for any other clinical or ethical policy positions. Moreover, on an issue so central to the meaning of medical professionalism, it seems important for organized medicine to take a stand. We subsequently review the arguments in favor of PAS (arguments from autonomy and mercy, and against the distinction between killing and allowing to die (K/ATD)) and the arguments against legalization (the limits of autonomy, effects on the patient-physician relationship, the meaning of healing, the validity of the K/ATD distinction, the social nature of suicide, the availability of alternatives, the propensity for incremental extension, and the meaning of control). We conclude that organized medicine should continue its opposition to PAS.
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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.