Physician Howard Glicksman on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

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

• Get a copy of Dr. Richard Weikart’s new book Unnatural Death.

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