I generally publish and present on VSED in narrower academic and scholarly venues. So, I was unusually pleased with the big reach of this recent Hemlock Society presentation and a recent VHA presentation.
In contrast to my more specialized work for professionals, Kate Christie and Nancy Simmers are raising awareness on a much wider scale. This recent article nicely summarizes some of their work. And it nicely explains the advantage of VSED in the context of dementia: "it takes years of slow suffering and compresses it into 10 days."
VSED remains important for at least three reasons:
1. Many patients live where MAID is unavailable.
2. Even patients living in one of the 14 jurisdictions that have authorized MAID are often ineligible (e.g. patients with dementia).
3. Even eligible patients living in one of the 14 jurisdictions that have authorized MAID have difficulty accessing it.
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| Kate Christie & her mother |
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