Assisted Suicide Research Paper

Assisted suicide is a non-widely known controversy in our country for years now. Many, including professionals in the healthcare industry, confuse this term with euthanasia and other similar concepts. Assisted suicide is when a physically and mentally capable person, most likely diagnosed with a terminal illness, makes a decision to end their lives themselves for reasons such as to not inconvenience their families with financial and emotional difficulty, and to end their own suffering. On the other hand euthanasia is when another person, usually a physician, is directly performing the act on the dying person with or without their consent for emergency reasons. Clearly, the difference is that assisted suicide gives the person the right to die
Mary Ersek, “a research scientist in the pain research department at Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, Washington, and research associate professor in the department of biobehavioral nursing and health systems at the University of Washington School of Nursing in Seattle,” “Assisted Suicide: Unravelling A Complex Issue,” focuses on the ones performing the act, specifically professionals in the medical field. The article is not opinionated unlike the Frontline film. Even though the article is seven years more outdated than the documentary film, it has a decent amount of facts and statistics playing as the structure of the article. It also does not focus on just the pathos aspect of the issue. There is no sign of emotional manipulation in the article. Not to mention that it was written by Mary Ersek, who has a PhD, making her more credible than the documentary’s filmmakers. In addition to being a research scientist, she is also a registered nurse. All the article does is define what other relative concepts were confused with assisted suicide, and discuss the circumstances of a healthcare professional needs to consider before participating in this act. Thus, placing it on neither sides of the article, which is the neutral