Global attitudes toward euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are becoming more relaxed, but a recent study shows that physicians in Canada, Europe and the United States lag behind their patients in accepting the practice.
Public support for euthanasia in the United States rose from 37 percent in 1947 to approximately 70 percent in 2014, with support for physician-assisted suicide lagging slightly behind, according to the study published in JAMA. Among doctors practicing in the U.S., only 54 percent approved of physician-assisted suicide by 2014, a trend reflected by doctors’ resistance to legal changes, notably in California. The study’s findings suggest greater comfort with the idea of euthanasia either in the abstract or in an idealized situation, reports MedicalDaily. The study authors concluded that patients most approving of the procedure and most likely to undertake it were well-educated white patients worried about a loss of dignity and physical ability. While 75 percent of patients seeking physician-assisted suicide had some form of cancer, only a third reported being in unbearable pain.
Some of the difference in attitudes may stem from doctors’ more intimate knowledge of death as a process compared to patients, as suggested by previous reporting by FiercePracticeManagement. The study found lower support for the procedure in Central and Eastern Europe than Western Europe, suggesting an inverse correlation with the strength of a population’s religious beliefs, according to Medical Daily. Overall, the study’s authors found support for the procedure highest among populations that were white, male, younger and religiously unaffiliated.
Regardless of the motivating factors, the study’s results suggest much of the argument continues to be academic: neither euthanasia nor physician-assisted suicide gets performed with any great frequency, despite broadening legal support for the procedures. The patients for whom they are performed predominately have some form of cancer. “Existing data do not indicate widespread abuse of these practices,” conclude the study’s authors.
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