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  3. The Supreme Court’s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying

The Supreme Court’s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying

admin2013-06-02  51
问题     The Supreme Court’s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.
    Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect", a centuries-olii moral principle holding that an action having two effects—a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect.
    trol terminally ill patients’ pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient.
    Professor George Ann as maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It’s like surgery," he says. "We don’t call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn’t intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you’re a physician, you can risk your patient’s death as long as you don’t intend their suicide."
    Just three weeks before the Court’s ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the under-treatment of pain and aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care.
    The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for hospital-based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life.
    Ann as says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse." He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear...that painful deaths are presumptively (据推定) ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension."
George Annas would probably agree that doctors should be punished if they ______.
选项 A、manage their patients incompetently
B、give patients more medicine than needed
C、reduce drug dosages for their patients
D、prolong the needless suffering of the patients
答案D
解析 见文中最后一段的最后一句话．A “对病人治疗不当”不够确切；B “给病人多于其需要的药物”和C “减少病人的药物剂量”都只是表象，不是判断医生是否该罚的标准；D “延长病人的不必要的痛苦”是文章最后一句话的同义转述，故选D。
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