Assisted dying would loom over end-of-life care

sir – Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (“Why I remain firmly against assisted dying”, Comment, October 4) articulates well the difficulties involved in finding the best way of looking after a loved one towards the end of their life.

I have myself experienced this. Thanks to the kindness and compassion of care-home workers, my mother was able to spend her final days in dignity with her family by her side as she peacefully passed away. Were the law to change and assisted dying become an option in instances such as this, my mother’s end-of-life care might have been overshadowed by a dreadful choice of having to have a discussion with a doctor about helping her to take her own life.

Our existing end-of-life laws and customs already work well. There is no space for assisted suicide, the introduction of which would risk soon being interpreted as a duty to die to relieve emotional burdens on others. Baroness Jolly (Lib Dem)

London SW1

sir – Anne Whitehouse (Letters, October 9) quotes Dame Cicely Saunders saying that there is no need to kill the patient in order to kill their pain. In the 1960s, as a staff nurse at St Christopher’s Hospice, south London, I worked with Dame Cicely daily.

It is true that symptomatic relief – especially pain relief – was superbly managed in the hospice. However, it has been a huge disappointment to find that palliative care in today’s much more advanced world is not any better than it was 50 years ago.

To manage pain you have to understand the principles of analgesia, and most doctors don’t. If you are lucky enough to be referred to a good palliative care unit you’ll be fine, but otherwise you will be stuck with inadequate pain relief prescribed by doctors who usually under-prescribe analgesic drugs in both dosage and frequency. They either don’t believe, or fail to understand, that giving painkillers regularly rather than on demand results in lower doses and patients being more comfortable, less sedated and therefore active, both mentally and physically, for longer.

For this reason alone I support assisted dying.

Sarah Meidlinger

Ringwood, Hampshire