HANSON Li (South China Morning Post, August 2) makes a plea for euthanasia on the understanding that there is a need for doctors who ''care'' to sometimes practise it.
I agree that doctors and other caring professionals should strive to improve the care given to patients but I cannot agree that the question of whether or not a patient's life is prolonged indefinitely on artificial life support falls within the bounds of euthanasia, nor is giving ''a little extra dose of morphine'' to a dying patient suffering unremitting pain.
If doses of morphine are gradually adjusted in conjunction with other treatments, as has been so well developed by the hospice movement, dying patients may ultimately be on very high doses that could not be tolerated by a healthy person on a one-off basis. Such patients can nevertheless enjoy clarity and a good quality of life. This must be our aim - to help patients to ''live''.
We may unfortunately sometimes fail at this, but unless it is our ''intention'' we do not really have a caring attitude.
David Leung (South China Morning Post, July 13 and 28) is advocating something inherently different from this kind of care. The deliberate intention is to kill, supposing that this is best for the persons involved. This is indeed euthanasia.
History has shown that this is a ''Mistakes'' are not merely, as Mr Leung comments, ''problems of an evolving system''. Experience, past and present, shows us that the direction of the evolution is inevitably toward widening the criteria for euthanasia.
