Although palliative care and legalised euthanasia are both based on the medical and ethical values of patient autonomy and caregiver beneficence and non-maleficence,1 they are often viewed as antagonistic causes. A popular perception, for instance, is that palliative care is the province of religiously motivated people and the advocacy of euthanasia that of agnostics or atheists.2 3 The European Association for Palliative Care has voiced concerns that legalising euthanasia would be the start of a slippery slope resulting in harm to vulnerable patients such as elderly and disabled people and that it would impede the development of palliative care by appearing as an alternative.4 Data from the Netherlands and Belgium, where euthanasia is legal, do not provide any evidence of a slippery slope.5 6 Here, we focus on the effect of the process of legalisation of euthanasia on palliative care and vice versa by reviewing the published historical, regulatory, and epidemiological evidence
Conclusions The increased use of continuous deep sedation for patients nearing death in the Netherlands and the limited use of palliative consultation suggests that this practice is increasingly considered as part of regular medical practice.
Rurik Löfmark, Tore Nilstun, Colleen Cartwright, Susanne Fische, Agnes van der Heide, Freddy Mortier, Michael Norup, Lorenzo Simonato and Bregje D Onwuteaka-Philipsen for the EURELD Consortium
The book strives for as complete and dispassionate a description of the situation as possible and covers in detail: the substantive law applicable to euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, withholding and withdrawing treatment, use of pain relief in potentially lethal doses, terminal sedation, and termination of life without a request (in particular in the case of newborn babies); the process of legal development that has led to the current state of the law; the system of legal control and its operation in practice; and, the results of empirical research concerning actual medical practice.