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09 Nov 2008 10:55 pm

Fading Out

Courtney Campbell looks at Oregon's "death with dignity" ten years later:

...the passage of the ODDA led to a greater effort on the part of physicians and palliative and hospice care teams to ensure adequate pain control. A Task Force to Improve the Care of Terminally-Ill Oregonians was established to bring greater awareness to the question of pain management immediately following implementation.

The task force issued an influential report in 1998 that practitioners still rely on a decade later. Institutions involved in pain management developed new protocols, and laws that had raised the prospect of licensure investigations of physicians who provided more pain medication than called for in conventional medical protocols were rescinded. Thus, physicians no longer faced a professional and legal deterrent against the use of personalized pain control methods.

As noted above, the lower-than-expected number of patients requesting lethal drugs can likely be attributed in part to these improvements in the quality of pain management. And even the patients who requested and used lethal prescriptions—recall, 27 percent of those 341 patients said they were worried about inadequate pain control—may not have been experiencing pain in their terminal phase but rather anticipating and hoping to avoid a painful death.

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