Euthanasia Doctor Failed to Ask Patient

JAPANESE police yesterday raided the house of a doctor suspected of mercy-killing a cancer patient without his consent. 

Dr Yoshihiro Yamanaka admitted at a news conference on June 6 that he gave a fatal dose of muscle relaxant to a middle aged businessman who was suffering from terminal stomach cancer. 

Euthanasia is legal in Japan if four conditions are satisfied: the patient must be near death, untreatable and in unbearable pain. He must also express his wish to die. 

Dr Yamanaka's actions met the first three requirements. The man was groaning and convulsing in agony, which a series of morphine injections failed to alleviate. Nothing could be done for him, and he would have died within an hour, according to the doctor.

 But the doctor did not bother to ask for the patient's consent before killing him and never even told him he had cancer. This is normal in Japan, where doctors do not credit their patients with enough intelligence to decide the treatment they would like to receive.

Dr Yamanaka took this old tradition of playing God to an unusual extreme.

Cancer sufferers are almost never told they have the disease, on the grounds that the knowledge might upset them. Instead of explaining the pros and cons of radiation therapy or surgery to their patients, doctors usually do whatever they think appropriate without consulting them. 

Dr Yamanaka took this old tradition of playing God to an unusual extreme. "It is the doctor's duty to ensure a smooth transition from life to death," he told reporters recently. "It's impossible to ask people who do not know they have cancer if they want euthanasia carried out . . . [so] what I did could not possibly be called murder."

Not everyone agrees. An anonymous caller, assumed to be someone working at the hospital near Kyoto where the killing took place, tipped off the police, who are now considering charging the doctor with murder.