“Most Doctors Oppose Physician-Assisted Suicide, Poll Finds”

2/3rds Oppose Physician-assisted Suicide in Poll Conducted by New England Journal of Medicine Surveying its Own Members

 By Dave Andrusko

 The headline on the story is encouraging enough—“Most Doctors Oppose Physician-Assisted Suicide, Poll Finds”—but that’s only the beginning. Here’s the opening paragraph of Steve Reinberg’s story for HealthDay.

He is writing about a poll conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) of the journal’s readers, mostly health-care providers.

“Whether doctors should help patients die continues to be a hotly debated topic within the medical community, a New England Journal of Medicine poll finds. The journal questioned readers about a hypothetical near-death case and received more than 2,000 valid responses. Roughly two-thirds worldwide — including 67 percent of replies from the United States — said they disapprove of physician-assisted suicide. Most readers of the journal are doctors.”

Okay, what else?

  That 2/3rds “no” vote came even though the case was really designed to get agreement: a 72-year-old man with incurable metastatic prostate cancer. I’m guessing the authors were not happy with the results, for they wrote that “online voting . . . is prone to bias and is likely not to be scientifically valid.”

 article continues at http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org