But even though they end up taking doses of the drug that would quickly kill a person who has not been taking morphine, the drug has little effect on these patients' breathing.ĭr. Lynn said, is that as patients' pain gets worse, they require more and more morphine to control it. The patients, she said, become more tolerant of the drug's effect on respiration than they do of its effect on pain. Joanne Lynn, director of the Center to Improve Care of the Dying at George Washington University School of Medicine, something peculiar happens when doctors gradually increase a patient's dose of morphine. No one denies that an overdose of morphine can be lethal. Balfour Mount, a cancer specialist who directs the division of palliative care at McGill University in Montreal, firmly states that it is ''a common misunderstanding that patients die because of high doses of morphine needed to control pain.'' Experts in palliative care say the only available evidence indicates that morphine is not having this effect.ĭr. Luce and others are asking whether morphine and similar drugs really speed death. And there is no question that most doctors think that morphine can hasten a patient's death by depressing respiration.īut Dr. Luce, a professor of medicine and anesthesiology at the University of California in San Francisco. There is no question that doctors use morphine this way. So why forbid doctors to prescribe lethal pills that could allow patients to control how and when they die? PROPONENTS of assisted suicide often argue that when a doctor helps a patient who wants to die, it is no more ethically troubling than when a doctor kills a patient slowly with morphine, often without the patient's knowledge or consent, a medical practice these proponents say is increasingly common.
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