nasia). To complicate things further, there is also voluntary euthanasia, “Cases in which patient requests to be killed, and dies as a result of action taken by another person,” involuntary euthanasia; “cases in which no action is requested because the patient is unconscious, senile, or otherwise incapable of making a request, but the person is allowed to die or is killed,” and nonvoluntary euthanasia; “cases in which a conscious, terminally ill patient states that they do not want to die, but is allowed to die or is killed anyway” (http://valdosta.peachnet.edu). While an individual may advocate one form of euthanasia, it is not uncommon for the same person to be completely against another form. There are cases in which euthanasia is wrong, especially cases involving conscious people who are not really in a lot of pain, seeking death. In these cases, some kind of counseling would make a lot more sense than just accepting that these people think they need to die and therefore should. On the other hand, there are also certainly cases where euthanasia is a less painful alternative to what may otherwise lie ahead. In most of these cases, the disease will end up killing the individual anyway, so why prolong pain by putting people with incurable illnesses on life support? After all, as stated before, one of the main goals of medicine is to alleviate pain and suffering. If there is no cure to an illness, and the treatments, as well as the disease are painful, why put the individual, and the family, through financial and emotional anguish? One problem many of the opponents of euthanasia have with such “mercy killing” is that it is killing, and, to many, this constitutes murder. To murder, however, by definition, is “to kill brutally or inhumanly,”(American Heritage Dictionary.) It is possible that very few of the mercy killings that have occurred over the years have been murder; however, suicide would probably be a better word. After all, it is, in most cases, the individual with the disease is the one who ma

Some topics in this essay:
Ronald Cranford, Jack Kevorkian’s, Heritage Dictionary, Euthanasia Debate, Jack Kevorkian, life support, assisted suicide, Journal Medicine, euthanasia “cases, issue euthanasia, pain suffering, euthanasia “mercy killing”, “mercy killing”, control death, hotly debated, allowed die, relative friend, individual choose die,