Oregon Physician Offers Suicide Drugs to Overseas Patients: “The End-of-Life Care They Deserve”

But one Portland doctor changed all that. last march, dr Nicholas Gideonsea 62-year-old “family doctor” physician with alleged specialties in obstetrics and obstetrics at Oregon Health & Science University, settled a lawsuit with the state to end residency restrictions, thereby providing a route for potential patients in other states to purchase suicide drugs from him, as long as they first spend at least 15 days in the state.

“The last thing my dying patients needed,” Gideonse said after announcing the settlement, “was to find a new doctor in their final days so they could get the end-of-life care they deserve just because they happened to be alive.” ” in Washington State.

But Gideonese is now expanding its reach beyond Washington state to the entire country. Although Oregon law will not officially allow out-of-state patients to receive so-called end-of-life care there until later this year, Gideonse has already publicly announced that he has begun “substantial” discussions with those in other states suffering from terminal illness Illness.

Last October, during a Zoom session for the Completed Life Initiative fall conference, Gideonse announced that he had spoken to a Texas man who was diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gideonse gave no details on this patient’s case or outcome, but said he receives calls from similar patients in other states “every few weeks.”

Although Gideonse and his panellists were enthusiastic about the new “interstate access to medical euthanasia,” Matt Vallière, executive director of the Patients Rights Action Fund, which opposes physician-assisted suicide, said these changes in assisted suicide regulations will allow suicide and state residency chaos as many patients receiving the drugs prefer to take them at home. “You end up with this Wild West scenario where people are taking the drugs back to their home states,” Vallière claimed, “and there are a lot more questions than answers as to what would happen afterward.”

Others have expressed concern that other states, like Vermont, which recently legalized physician-assisted suicide, will soon begin enticing people to seek “end-of-life care” even if they don’t have a terminal illness. So-called “medical assistance in dying” laws in Canada have already prompted people with mental illnesses and those who fear social problems such as poverty and homelessness to consider ending their lives.

“Many view these laws as a danger to people with critical illnesses, chronic conditions and significant disabilities in our cost-conscious healthcare system,” said Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, a group that also opposes physician-assisted suicide.

But Gideonse sees no difference in prescribing deadly drugs to patients and treating other conditions. In fact, he even compared assisted suicide to “the birth of babies.” “In no other way is my practice limited to residents of Oregon,” he said last year“whether that’s the birth of babies in the past or other care that I offer.”

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