though what Dr. Death had done may or may not be within the accepted social or professional norms, but his ideal belief and the trend line that follows, maybe something the medical fraternity is looking for. for better or worse.
Here's why Dr. Jack Kevorkian probably had a profoundly correct message:
This was a time when the American medical enterprise was very afraid to use opiates to treat pain in cancer and other terminally ill patients, concerned that they would addict, or would be accused of addicting, their desperate patients. And doctors and nurses practiced the notion that human life should be preserved and extended at any cost in suffering or money.
It took the Debbie case, the Kevorkian extreme actions, and yet other trailblazers who saw life and death through a different prism to move our society, ever so slowly, towards realizing that death is not the enemy; the enemies are premature death, disease, disability, pain, human suffering.
Death is normal. Every American deserves to have a death with dignity and as free from pain as possible, as can now happen with much hospice care.
Strange though he was, Jack Kevorkian helped us as a society to move a little closer to that ideal.
Let’s keep that trend line.
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