Kathleen Foley and Herbert Hendin - Euthanasia

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Kathleen Foley, MD, Professor in the Department of Neurology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and Herbert Hendin, MD, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the New York Medical College, wrote in the introduction to their 2002 book, The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care:

“Opposition to legalization [of assisted suicide and euthanasia] is strongest among physicians who know most about caring for terminally ill patients (i.e., palliative care specialists…). They know that patients requesting a physician’s assistance in suicide are usually telling us as strongly as they know how that they desperately need relief from their suffering and that without such relief they would rather die. They are making an anguished cry for help and a very ambivalent request to die. When they are treated by a physician who can hear their ambivalence, understand their desperation, and relieve their suffering, the wish to die usually disappears.”
2002