Euthanasia rejected 'for time being'

BMA conference: Doctors' key vote

Deliberately ending the lives of terminally ill patients who request euthanasia is an admission of defeat and should have no place in medical practise, doctors decided yesterday.

There is no suffering so great that it cannot be eased by modern drugs and medical techniques and there is consequently no justification for doctors to discard their caring role and become state licensed killers, the BMA said.

However, the association's annual conference in Edinburgh agreed by a narrow majority to include the words "for the time being" in a motion opposing euthanasia, signalling its intention to return to the issue in the future.

In a powerful debate, doctors described how they had been pressed by both patients and relatives to end lives with lethal doses of drugs.

Dr Fay Wilson, a GP in Birmingham, said: "However much I want to help with their suffering I wasn't able to kill them. We are doctors. Our function is to heal and comfort, not to dispose of people."

She said patients who had requested euthanasia had later thanked her for refusing when their condition had improved.

Dr Jane Orr, a Surrey GP, said: "Bad deaths do sometimes occur but that is due to bad medicine. The answer to bad medicine is not to kill people but to create good medicine."

Some speakers argued that it was arrogant for doctors to decide the issue alone and called for a royal commission on euthanasia. A ballot of 900 doctors in Worcestershire, to which 300 replied, found a third were in favour of a change in the law to permit the practice and a third said they would assist a suicide.

Dr Michael Stuart, a GP in Southend and a founding member of The Association of Palliative Care, described the case of a man with cancer in his spine who was unable to walk and was admitted to a hospice where it was expected he would spend his final days.

"He was terrified but we controlled his symptoms, he regained his confidence and he left the hospice walking," he said.

The man did not die until several months later - of a heart attack.

The conference was warned by BMA chairman Dr Sandy Macara not to jeopardise the doctor patient relationship by voting for euthanasia.

"Patients see us as serving life not embracing death and we should do nothing to betray that trust," he said.

Earlier, an updated version of the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath, drafted by the association's ethics committee, was criticised by the conference for being too long and too dull.

The oath, which pledges doctors to follow the medical ethical code, is supposedly sworn by students on qualification but fewer than half of medical schools follow the practice. The BMA has for two years been working on a new wording of the oath appropriate for use by doctors around the world.

Dr Hector Spiteri, a GP from Redbridge, said the new version, which is three times the length of the old, was too long to be sworn orally and was unnecessarily contentious.