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Attitudes of Dutch General Practitioners and Nursing Home Physicians to Active Voluntary Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide
Steven G. Hammer, MD
Medical College of Wisconsin Waukesha
Arch Fam Med. 1996;5(9):495.
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The November 1995 report1 on attitudes of Dutch general practitioners toward euthanasia was both thought-provoking and disturbing. Dr Onwuteaka-Philipsen et al make several inaccurate generalizations in the article. They state that "requests made to Dutch physicians far outnumber the actual administrations of EAS [euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide]." According to statistics reported by the governmentappointed Committee to Investigate the Medical Practice Concerning Euthanasia, there are actually 25 306 cases of euthanasia annually in the Netherlands. This number far exceeds the 2300 cases of active voluntary euthanasia, which was the definition of euthanasia used by the committee. The figure of 2300 refers only to only voluntary and active cases, thereby excluding all cases of involuntary or indirect euthanasia. Taken as a whole, these figures far exceed the 6700 annual requests for euthanasia. The massive underreporting and underrecognition changes the setting within which physician attitudes are described.2
The rule that physicians
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
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