“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]

 [BBC] A former BBC presenter is being investigated in Britain after admitting he killed his lover.
Ray Gosling said the man he killed was suffering from Aids and in great pain.
Ray Gosling was arrested on Tuesday after he told a BBC documentary that he smothered the man. The admission and investigation has added to an already [...]

[dailymail] A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them [...]

[Special to The Birmingham News]  At the end of December 2000 on a cold night, my brother Bob called.
“Dad’s not doing very well,” he said. “If you want to see him before he dies, you’d better fly up here.”
I didn’t believe him. At age 88, my dad had weathered crises before, and he had told [...]

Step aside Jack Kevorkian, there’s a new “Dr. Death” in town.
Ten years after the notorious Michigan doctor was ultimately jailed for killing a patient — one of 130 he helped die through lethal injection — Philip Nitschke, a new renegade physician, is spreading the gospel of assisted suicide — and he’s coming to the United [...]

Official guidelines are causing a crisis in care of the terminally ill and growing anger among patients’ families, medical experts say.
[BBC] The advice allows food and fluids to be withdrawn from patients, who are then continuously sedated, if they are judged to be close to death.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph the six doctors [...]

[AMNews] Doctors are right to advise an end to feeding for pediatric patients in a persistent vegetative state and some other circumstances, the association says.
For nearly two decades, the medical and legal consensus has been that it is permissable to withdraw life-sustaining artificial hydration and nutrition from adult patients in a persistent vegetative state. But [...]

[NYT] LONDON — The controversy over the ethical and legal issues surrounding assisted suicide for the terminally ill was thrown into stark relief on Tuesday with the announcement that one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, Sir Edward Downes, had flown to Switzerland last week with his wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of [...]

[Billings Gazette] JUNE 2, 2009 HELENA – The assisted-suicide case before the Montana Supreme Court is drawing a barrage of briefs from legislators, physicians and groups.
The state of Montana has asked the court to reverse a lower-court ruling that Montanans have a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide.
Before a Tuesday deadline, at least 14 motions to participate [...]

[Guardian] Senior doctors will tomorow express concern over the number of Britons suffering from non fatal illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis and kidney disease who have used the Swiss suicide service, Dignitas.
Their fears were raised after the Guardian obtained a list drawn up by Dignitas which reveals the medical conditions which have driven 114 Britons [...]