Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.
When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.
There's a certain libertarian right-wing view that there should be no FDA, that people can decide for themselves whether medicines are safe and effective. That's nonsense. Most people don't have the expertise or the resources to mount a proper study to find out whether a treatment is safe or effective.
The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.
For all of life's discontents, according to the pharmaceutical industry, there is a drug and you should take it. Then for the side effects of that drug, then there's another drug, and so on. So we're all taking more drugs, and more expensive drugs.
Just look at herbal remedies. It's essentially a throwback. It's saying you go to a plant and you mush it up and you stick it in the jar and you sell it and you eat it and it's going to cure what ails you. And that's the kind of stuff that people believed in the early 19th century.
