The American Medical Association condemns physician-assisted suicide, stating that it's disrespectful to physicians by judging the physicians' ability to cure patients. The AMA has commented that the fundamental role of the physician is to heal patients at every cost—it's their fundamental duty. Physician-assisted suicide goes against the commitment to principles of the ancient oath to do no harm. Physician-assisted death is fundamentally in direct opposition with a physician's role as a healer and violation of that role poses a substantial risk to society.
AMA showed their concern that there are unintended consequences of legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Not only does physician-assisted suicide present issues in conflict with a doctors’ duty but the AMA has encountered a few cases where patients with psychiatric conditions were given a lethal dose of drugs even though they were not technically qualified.
Physician-assisted suicide may be an affront to the physician’s role as healer, but it is also an assault on the lives of people with disabilities, putting them and other vulnerable groups at risk of deadly harm through abuse, mistakes, and outright coercion toward ending life. It will create a great risk of depression in such patients and, in some cases, there is a chance of family and medical pressure to encourage #patients to request a death petition. In some cases, patients can't understand that the degree of relief of suffering state-of-the-art palliative care can offer. AMA discovered that most of the patients who request physician-assisted death have nothing to do with the pain, but instead there are some other reasons, such as being a burden to the family, concern for daily life after illness, financial situation, and other psychological conditions which are not related with the physical condition of the patient. Mostly those conditions are merely thinking of their own beliefs. Widespread of such culture will lead to more harm than good in future generations.
Physicians and the community may view disabled, elder, and terminal illness patients as a burden to society. There is even a chance of cases where a physician may see some patient as not worth living or there will be a mental pressure from a physician from requesting patients to file for a death plea. Legalization of physician-assisted suicide may even encourage other types of self suicide methods. It would promote the idea of physician-assisted deaths for other illness, such as depression and anxiety.
Instead of generalizing such a disastrous method, there should be more efforts should be made to help patients navigate the complex existential and psychological sufferings that terminally ill patients face. Rather than putting patients and physicians in morally challenging positions, we need to invest in adequate training for physicians and proper investment in health care for patients of all economic class. The allowance of physician-assisted suicide is a morally dangerous situation for both physicians and terminally ill patients.
