The issue of euthanasia aside, the elephant in the room is the tyranny of the AMA, where government handed absolute powers to a particular cartel or a professional guild, forbidding Australians to give and receive consensual medical help from whoever they want. Euthanasia is just one issue - the AMA expels anyone who would not agree with their philosophy, including doctors who also practice alternative medicine.

The problem with the anti euthanasia lobby is that they continue to promulgate the myth that the need for humanely ending the lives of suffering people with terminal illness applies to the whole of the community. In reality, only about two percent of the population are effected, the rest with die peacefully of natural causes.

David

the law needs changing . AMA is wrong

will join Exit to be ready for when i want to use it

ben

Long live both Philip Nitschke and Marshall Perron.
Two very forward thinking and humane people.

More arrogant bulldust from this man who thinks he knows best about what people want. The AMA and Hope are indeed tyrants. Three cheers for Nitschke and what he stands for.

He needs to own his own behavior and be accountable for it. Hopefully that ego and his ability to always be right, will eventually be his undoing?

We need a roust A.M.A. to keep rogue doctors out of operating theatres, just as we need an air transport Authority with teeth to keep untrained and unsafe pilots away from the controls of commercial aircraft, and for very similar reasons.

Given only around 2% of us are ever likely to need the sort of assistance Doctor death provides,with the rest of us dying in our time of natural causes; there can be no reason to compel the rest of us to accept it and the slippery slope it ushers in as law, particularly when the hyperventilating euthanasia lobby have the opportunity to make a living will anyway!
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty.

He is not a 'rogue doctor' and he doesn't go into operating theatres. Nor his ego as big as that of the tyrannical members of AMA.

Last time Nitschke had anything to do with medicine was as official medico for a local football team in 2007. He also recently saved somebody's life during a plane flight. Naughty boy. He should have let the person die?

As always, yoe can't tell your armpit from your elbow, but you sure make a lot of noise for an ignoramus.

I watched my mother die in absolute agony due to breast cancer that went to the bone.

As the morphine dose increased my mum begged me to get her out of the hospital. But I could not do that, not allowed to either.

Every movement grated together cancer riddled bone joints and that agony plus the morphine created a real life 24 hours a day nightmare.

My mother had a right to die in peace instead of in acute agony.

It is illegal to treat animals that way.

I think people who oppose euthanasia should think again.

Dear Paul Russel.

My opinion is that most people from my own working class demographic support euthanasia. I myself am going to eat a bullet rather than go out the painful way, or end my life as a dribbling, incontinent idiot.

I will bet that you will not support a plebiscite on this issue because you know that you will lose. You are just another moralising busybody determined to impose your own stupid religions morality over people who do not want it.

If you wish to propose an argument against euthanasia than I will listen and hear what you say. But your article did not do that. It falsely pretended to be the only moral choice and that Dr Nietzke is a dishonorable man. Any doctor who burns his medical certificate because he is more concerned about his patients than his status or his income is more of a doctor than the young medico's I see every day in my job, walking around with their noses in the air.

Oh dear. The Catholic lobbyists, they never stop. Best you preach to the few interested. Those of us who find Nitschke and his information very helpful, will continue to ignore the Church and make sure that suffering is reduced and that people have choices in their lives, as so many of us wish to have.

In my opinion Dr Russell's views are simply wrong and reflect the rigid christian thinking of the middle (dark) ages and the monopolistic godlike attitude of the medical profession. Dr Russell seems blissfully unaware that science and technology have moved massively over the past 2-3 generations. It is now possible for terminally ill persons to fix their affairs, make any goodbyes they feel inclined to make and end a life simply, painlessly and with dignity. The alternative is in reality no longer a life but a slow usually painful death. The support for voluntary euthanasia is very strong in the community and if I believed in saints (which I do not) then Dr Nitschke would be foremost among them. The greed and lack of compassion of the medical fraternity in unnecessarily prolonging a life is typical of the god like view this profession has of itself. I would welcome a national plebiscite on voluntary euthanasia.