Research Paper on:
Assisted Suicide and Quality of Life

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
assisted suicide. The outcome of that debate will profoundly affect family relationships, interaction between doctors and patients, and concepts of basic ethical behavior" (Marker; Hamlon, 2002; faq.htm). Touching upon the  quality of life, and defining its importance, or its status in a patient, has not necessarily been the most important topic in the field of medicine. True, comfort and  eliminating illness is, but those are aspects of health that only touch upon the subject of quality of life. Ethics do not address whether someone is content with their health  at present, they only address what the society may feel is wrong. In the following paper we examine assisted suicide, and argue, based on the quality of life a patient  experiences, that assisted suicide should be permitted, although perhaps with strict guidelines and specific regulations. Ethics and the Quality of Life It should first be noted that there  are two different forms of euthanasia in the medical community. There is passive euthanasia which allows a person to die by taking them off of machines or by keeping certain  medication from them that would prolong their life. Active euthanasia is essentially assisted suicide for it takes direct action it does not merely deny treatment. This is a commonly understood  doctrine and one upheld by most medical professionals. However, many argue that this approach is wrong and that assisted suicide, based on the quality of life, is something that  should be acceptable. In arguing this let us imagine an individual who is suffering from an incurable form of cancer, a throat cancer that is literally eating away at the  patient. The patient is in excruciating pain, a pain that cannot be eased by medication any longer. The doctors have only given this patient a few days to live, but