Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
August 16, 2000
PBS show offers inside look at assisted suicide
By Mark Pattison
HOLLYWOOD (CNS) - A former advocate of physician-assisted suicide who recanted her earlier support and now runs the palliative care program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City will be featured on an upcoming PBS documentary on dying.
"I was a very strong proponent of legalization for a number of years, and wrote about it, did research about it, and it was my experience with patients that caused me to change my mind. And I'm now an opponent of legalization," said Dr. Diane Meier.
She will be seen in a four-part, six-hour documentary special called "On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying," which will air Tuesday-Friday, Sept. 10-13, 9-10:30 p.m. EDT each night on PBS. The programs are hosted by Bill Moyers.
Meier told television writers the criteria for acceding to a physician-assisted suicide cannot be met.
"The kind of criteria that are necessary to assure that a patient is cognitively intact, not confused, making a `rational' decision that is consistent over weeks, is not pressured by financial and family burden, guilt and anxiety, and is known to be `terminal' just flies in the fact of everything we know about people with serious illness," she said.
"People are very rarely consistently cognitively intact in the weeks and months before they die," she continued, noting that one, "their brains are affected by their illness," and two, "we are really bad at predicting when people die."
"And the data supports that. We are as often wrong as we are right," she said.
"And the assisted-suicide law presumes that a doctor can predict, looking at a patient, when he or she is going to die, and therefore when he or she would be eligible for legal assisted suicide," Meier said.
"I'm worried that legalization will put not-to-subtle pressure on dying people to opt for that option, and get out of the way and stop burdening others."
Meier said instruction on palliative care is something that has been sorely missing from most medical school curriculums for too long.
"I went through four years of medical school at Northwestern and Chicago, did three years of residency at a university hospital in Portland, two years of geriatrics fellowship at a reputable teaching hospital (and) did not have a single lecture on pain management in nine years," she said.
The reason is because doctors see death as "not normal, or something that we can make better through appropriate medical care," she said. "Death is a failure, so we're not going to teach you about (it), we're not going to address it as a responsibility of medicine."
"On Our Own Terms" looks not only at palliative care as a viable option for the dying, but at people who are living with the knowledge that they are terminally ill; models of health care for the dying and their families; and the decisions made by dying patients - and sometimes for them - on what constitutes appropriate care.
In one segment on the third night of the program, Dr. Carlos Gomez, a Catholic doctor at University Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., who is opposed to physician-assisted suicide, struggles with his stance as a patient is affected by the final stages of liver failure, becoming delirious, agitated and thrashing.
"The best that I can do for him is to sedate him and let him die," Gomez says on the broadcast. "I would prefer that he be alert and talking all the way to infinity, but I can't do that."
Moyers, commenting on Gomez's dilemma, said, "It's one of the most powerful (TV) sequences I've seen in my 30 years at this."
