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Terminally ill patient in hospice

Physician Howard Glicksman on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Series
ID the Future
Guest
Howard Glicksman
Duration
00:36:57
Download
Audio File (50.74M)

The culture of death wrongly interprets the term compassion to mean “to get rid of” rather than its true meaning, “to suffer with.” On this episode, host Eric Anderson welcomes hospice physician Dr. Howard Glicksman to the podcast to discuss physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, the subjects of Dr. Richard Weikart’s recent book Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent From Healing to Killing.

As a hospice and palliative care physician for over twenty years, Dr. Glicksman regularly cares for terminally ill patients. Occasionally one of them expresses interest in euthanasia or assisted suicide, which can seem like a tempting or more compassionate option to some people. But for Glicksman, those practices are not in his toolbox: “At such moments my lodestar is the knowledge that human life has intrinsic and unalienable value, and that it is the physician’s sacred duty to care for life, not attack it.” Instead, Glicksman pours his effort into the hard work of caring for the needs of his patients, day by day.

In this conversation, Dr. Glicksman discusses why he became a hospice physician and relates some of his many experiences caring for patients in end-of-life situations. He explains why he does not endorse practices like physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. The conversation concludes with discussion of how the idea of design ties into these issues and why materialistic, evolutionary thinking promotes a culture of death rather than a culture of life.

Dig Deeper

  • Watch Eric Anderson’s recent interview with Dr. Richard Weikart about his book Unnatural Death:

Howard Glicksman

Dr. Howard Glicksman is a general practitioner with more than forty years of medical experience in office and hospital settings, who now serves as a hospice physician seeing terminally ill patients in their homes. He received his MD from the University of Toronto and is the author of “The Designed Body” series for Evolution News. Glicksman further develops the arguments from this series in a book co-authored with systems engineer Steve Laufmann, Your Designed Body (2022).
Tags
assisted suicide
euthanasia
Howard Glicksman
ID the Future