Compassion & Choices recently launched a statewide bilingual campaign to educate terminally ill Californians, families and medical providers about the benefits and requirements of the state’s medical aid-in-dying law.
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To be eligible, the law also requires that patients are mentally competent; have a prognosis of less than six months to live; and are physically capable of ingesting the drugs – a contrast with euthanasia that requires direct lethal action by another person.
“The physician must always act in the best interests of the patient as healer, comforter and trusted advisor”. If and when Fairchild feels the time is right, he plans to end his life using doctor-prescribed drugs.
The End of Life Option Act contains a variety of safeguards against abuse.
With the state’s right-to-die law in effect, the percentage of terminally ill US adults who can ask for medical aid in dying will leap from 4 percent to 16 percent, according to advocacy group Compassion & Choices. They can now end their own lives with doctor-prescribed medication without any legal consequences.
Groups in support of the law, such as Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit national organization that seeks to protect and expand aid-in-dying laws, meanwhile have engaged in public education campaigns throughout the state about the implications of the law. Passed by the Legislature, signed by Governor Brown, and supported by Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, the Death with Dignity law allows patients of sound mind who are suffering from a terminal illness and meet certain qualifications to request aid-in-dying medication. “Under the “End of Life Option Act”, California has become the fifth state in the nation to create a legal process for patients to obtain aid in dying”. She believes the issue is bigger than just a prescription. The patient has to be 18 years or older, the patient also has to have less than 6 months to live, and has to take the drug without help from anyone else. “They don’t talk about what they want or don’t want”, he said.
Dr. Catherine Sonquist MD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine and Medical Director of Stanford Health Care-Los Altos said physicians need to assess their patients’ mental health, prior treatment, and terminal diagnosis.
“This is a first for every single doctor in the state of California who would be eligible to write a prescription”.
“What’s happened in those states is that people have had the right to say to their physician, ‘I want to die more comfortably and quicker, ‘” Shavelson said.
CMA doesn’t keep a list or designate physicians who provide end of life drugs. In Oregon, people who opted for medications to end their lives tended to be those who are highly educated and affluent, he said. The law was passed in response to the story of Brittany Maynard, a California woman who had to move to OR to seek a legal way of ending her life.
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“If it gets to that point, I will without a doubt get the prescription and fill the prescription”, Wallner told KCRA 3. “When my suffering becomes too great, I can say to all those I love, I love you; come be by my side, and come say goodbye as I pass into whatever’s next”.
