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 [...]

[EurekaAlert] A growing number of hospitalized adults are incapable of making their own health decisions, but little research has explored how doctors feel about making medical decisions with a patient’s surrogate decision maker.
A study published in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that one in five doctors are not [...]

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[BBC] The advice allows food and fluids to be withdrawn from patients, who are then continuously sedated, if they are judged to be close to death.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] PETER SINGER – You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
The costs of the current [...]

[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 [...]

[Monterey Herald] At 82, retired engineer Leonard Thompson is out to show he still has a few good years left. Years? What’s this bunk about mere years, sonny? More like decades. Why the heck not?
Thompson, after all, exercises body and mind daily, even developing his own workout program for seniors that emphasizes stretching, deep breathing, [...]

[ABC] A terminally ill British teenager has won the right to die after she was taken to court by a hospital that wanted to force her to have a heart transplant.
Thirteen-year-old Hannah Jones has been in and out of hospital for most of the past 10 years, but now she has refused any more operations [...]