What Should Medical Boards Do?

A recent letter from Compassion in Dying, the national organization that successfully promoted an Oregon referendum legalizing physician-assisted suicide, went out to all 50 state medical boards, urging the following steps to promote adequate pain relief for the terminally ill:

• Adopt pain relief guidelines for the dying, specifying that addiction is not a concern.



• Remove unreasonable barriers to narcotic prescriptions for the terminally ill.



• Establish ombudsmen or other advocacy offices for the dying and their families.



• Encourage or mandate continuing medical education on the subject.



• Notify physicians that it may be appropriate to discipline physicians who fail to apply proven methods of pain control for dying patients.



• Investigate allegations of inadequate end-of-life pain control and require remediation and education for responsible doctors.



• Enforce pain control standards, treating failure to provide adequate pain medication as failure to meet professional standards.