UK: ‘Euthanasia by the back door’: How doctors give 2,500 patients drugs to accelerate their death every year
Daily Mail >> 24th March 2009
Some 2,500 patients die early every year after doctors give them drugs to accelerate their death – in what critics claim is euthanasia by the back door.
A survey of doctors has found that one in 200 lives are ended in this way, with at least 250 people a year dying more than a week earlier than they would otherwise have done.
All the patients were terminally ill, with doctors believing they were at the end of their lives.
And more than 80,000 are subjected to so called ‘slow euthanasia’, where they are given so much medication they are sent into a coma before they finally die.
In many cases this can speed up death and it is often given without the patient or the family being fully appraised of the consequences.