THE ETHICS OF EUTHANASIA - ATTITUDES AND PRACTICE AMONG NORWEGIAN PHYSICIANS

The ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Medical Association strongly c ondemn physician participation in euthanasia and assisted suicide. A p revious study on attitudes towards euthanasia in the Norwegian populat ion, however, indicates that a substantial part of the population is q uite liberal. This study explores Norwegian physicians' attitudes towa rds and experience with end of life dilemmas. Sixty-six percent of a r epresentative sample of 1476 who received postal questionnaires respon ded. They confirmed that Norwegian physicians actually seem to hold qu ite restrictive attitudes towards euthanasia. Seventeen percent answer ed yes to a question of whether a physician should have the opportunit y to actively end the life of a terminal patient in great pain who req uests this help, while 4% agreed that the same could be done to a chro nically ill patient with great pain and a poor quality of life who oth erwise would have several more years to live. Six percent of the physi cians had performed actions intended to hasten a patient's death, whil e 76% said that they at least once had treated patients even if they h ad felt that treatment should have been discontinued. A multiple logis tic regression analysis showed that internal medicine specialists, sur geons and psychiatrists were significantly more restrictive than their colleagues in laboratory specialties, and that physicians educated ab road and those with negative attitudes towards patient autonomy had mo re liberal attitudes towards euthanasia, when gender and time since gr aduation from medical school were controlled for. (C) 1997 Elsevier Sc ience Ltd.