About fifty-seven percent of practicing physicians have been approached at one time or the other and being requested to aid in assisted suicide. However, it has been established that most patients want to end their lives due to the suffering they go through in cases such as cancer. In the modern world, pain management has been taken to another level and it is possible to manage the same therefore reducing the patients’ suffering. This has been attributed to the decline in cases of assisted suicide recorded.

Doctors take an oath before they start practicing to do their best to save the patients’ lives as well as ensuring that the details given to them by the patient remain a secret. They should therefore not get involved in such actions as ending the patients’ lives. At times, the patient may be too ill to talk or sign consent and so their relatives are involved in requesting the doctor to end their patients’ life and save them the agony. This is ethically and legally wrong.

Claire and Manuel address the issue of assisted suicide by citing the case of Mathew Donnelly who wanted to end his life due to the agony of skin cancer. Mathew had used more than thirty years of his life conducting research on the use of x-rays and at that time he got skin cancer. He had lost his nose courtesy of the disease, his arm, and part of his jaw in recovery and therapy. His condition was not improving and he had become blind. His pleas to have his life ended fell on deaf years though the doctors knew well that he had less than a year to live. His brother seeing his agony killed him and was tried for murder. The question arose on whether that was right and whether the doctors should have aided in ending his life.