Thank you @hugorifkind for your immense honesty & thoughtfulness in this piece. thetimes.com/article/5050a7b…

I have cared for 1000s of palliative care patients, Philip, & I find your dismissal of a particular group of people as being 'beyond help' both crude and arrogant. The last months, weeks, hours & even days of life can - and very often do - contain love, wit, tenderness, humour. Only exceptionally rarely is suffering unalloyed, and even in those cases, there is no upper limit to the drugs we can legally provide (in case you were unaware). Plus, there is always something we can do to help our patients - we can provide tender, caring, vital humanity at their bedside, striving to ensure they do not feel abandoned, alone, unvalued and dismissed (as your words, fired off so effortlessly, appear to do). We are all, obviously, 'beyond help' in one sense - being mortal is a terminal condition. But carving up society into two groups, one of which is 'beyond help', is frankly arrogant and borderline offensive. Who, precisely, are you to judge this? And who are you to equate the desire for agency over the timing of one's death with being the 'only' way in which medicine can help a person with a terminal illness? As for your dismissal of @Tanni_GT's view as a "nice rhetorical turn", well, I strongly urge you to seek to understand more about - and opine less to - other people whose opinions may be rooted in experience you don't share. They might - though perhaps this is hard to imagine - be a little more nuanced than yours.