ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110055
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
SOURCE: Associated Press
NOTE: Below
A STUDY SHOWS that more than half of San Francisco AIDS doctors have assisted in suicides by giving AIDS patients narcotic overdoses.
People with AIDS often attempt suicide to end their suffering, and doctors appear increasingly willing to help them. Fully half of San Francisco AIDS doctors surveyed admit they have prescribed deadly doses of narcotics.
Reports Wednesday from the United States, Canada, England and the Netherlands at the 11th International Conference on AIDS suggest that suicide is a common way out for people with the disease.
Botched attempts - so-called ``coat-hanger euthanasia'' - are frequent, because physician-assisted suicide is illegal in most places. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that doctors and nurses often are willing to skirt the law or break it to relieve suffering.
``We suspect attitudes are changing. Inhibitions are loosening,'' said Thomas Mitchell of the University of California at San Francisco. ``Physicians are accepting assisted suicide more than in the past,''
Mitchell, a public health specialist, surveyed 228 members of a San Francisco area group of AIDS specialists. Half of them returned anonymous questionnaires, and 53 percent of those doctors said they had helped patients commit suicide by writing prescriptions for narcotic overdoses.
``Everyone knows this occurs, but there has been no quantifiable data on it,'' Mitchell said.
A similar survey five years earlier did not ask doctors whether they had helped with a suicide, because at the time the question was considered too sensitive. But when asked how they would react to a hypothetical case of patient suffering, 28 percent said then that they would probably help.
The apparent growing acceptance of suicide for AIDS patients comes as medical breakthroughs raise hopes that death from the disease can be delayed for years or perhaps avoided entirely.
Combinations of drugs involving a new class of medicines called protease inhibitors appear especially promising. Reports over the past six months - including several at the AIDS conference - suggest they can eliminate all detectable traces of HIV.
One of these studies, released Wednesday, was the first to show that combining two such drugs - Abbott Laboratories' ritonavir and Hoffman-LaRoche's saquinavir - works better than either alone. In very early results after just six weeks of therapy on 120 patients, levels of the virus fell by 99.6 percent.
Such findings have raised the spirits of researchers and patients, but no one knows whether the results will hold up over years of use.
Even if they do, Roz Leiser, an AIDS research nurse at the University of California, San Francisco, said the new treatments will be ineffective for some patients, and they may still opt for suicide to avoid lingering deaths from AIDS.
She conducted a separate survey of AIDS nurses in the San Francisco area. Fifteen percent acknowledged actively helping patients plan or carry out suicide. Two-thirds said they were willing to give AIDS patients information about how to kill themselves.
``I have seen people die horrible deaths,'' Leiser said. ``It's a choice people should have.''
A study by Dr. Lorraine Sherr of Royal Free Hospital surveyed 188 AIDS patients at a London clinic. It found 21 percent had tried to kill themselves, mostly with overdoses.
Just how many succeed is hard to judge. But in the Netherlands, which has liberal euthanasia laws, Dr. Henk-Maarten Lane estimated from a physician survey that 26 percent of people with AIDS in Amsterdam commit suicide with a physician's help.
Dr. Russ Ogden, of the University of Exeter in England, estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of AIDS patients in British Columbia killed themselves in 1993.
He also found that many rely on help from friends rather than doctors. That has sometimes meant slow, painful deaths.
``There is abundant evidence of botched assisted suicide,'' Ogden said. ``People are dying badly.''
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB