Dutch doctors grant 44 percent of requests to die
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Dutch doctors whose patients asked for their help in dying assisted in their suicide nearly half the time and turned them down just 12 percent of the time, researchers said on Monday.
Doctors granted patient requests to die in 44 percent of the cases, 13 percent withdrew their requests and 26 percent of patients died either before the decision was made or before euthanasia could be carried out, according to study author Marijke Jansen-van der Weide of VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam.
Doctors refused to help 12 percent of patients die, the researcher wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The most frequent reasons for requesting a physician’s help to commit suicide were “pointless suffering,” “loss of dignity” and “weakness,” the survey of 3,614 general practitioners in the Netherlands found.
The Netherlands, Belgium and the U.S. state of Oregon permit the practice of euthanasia, with various safeguards that remain controversial.
“The ultimate question remains: if you permit physicians to take life deliberately by assisting suicide or performing euthanasia, can you control the practice?” wrote University of Minnesota Law School professor Susan Wolf in an accompanying editorial.
Another study in the journal analyzed do-not-resuscitate orders at California hospitals and concluded that certain types of institutions were more likely to institute them.
Of more than 800,000 patient admissions at 386 hospitals studied, researcher David Zingmond of The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA found do-not-resuscitate orders were instituted in a range from 2 percent of 50- to 59-year-olds to 17 percent of over-80-year-olds.
The use of do-not-resuscitate orders varied widely, with rural hospitals more likely to use them than urban hospitals.
Orders were more commonly used in not-for-profit private hospitals compared to for-profit hospitals, were more often used in the smallest versus the largest hospitals, and were more common in nonacademic versus academic institutions.
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