Whitty: It would be ‘extremely difficult’ to list illnesses that would apply to assisted dying
England’s chief medical officer, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, has said it would be “extremely difficult” to have a list of illnesses that would apply under the proposed assisted dying legislation.
Asked if there could be a list of conditions, Sir Chris told MPs on the assisted dying bill committee: “If I’m honest, I think it would be extremely difficult.
“Let’s take cancer – for the great majority of people with the majority of cancers that are diagnosed tomorrow, the doctor who’s seeing them will say: ‘In all confidence, you have cancer, and I expect you to be alive, not just next Christmas, but it’s for many years to come’.
“So the fact they have cancer is not, in itself, a demonstration that they are going to die, and in fact the majority will not – almost 80% of people with breast cancer diagnosed tomorrow will still be alive 10 years later, for example.
“Equally, there are people who may not have a single disease that is going to lead to the path to death, but they have multiple diseases are interacting in the same person – they’re highly frail and it’s not the fact of one disease that’s the cause, but the fact of this constellation that is clearly leading them, on a path inexorably to a death at some point in the foreseeable future.
“Exact timings are tricky.
“But therefore, I think it’s quite difficult to actually specify these diseases are going to cause death, and these diseases are not, because in both directions, that could potentially be misleading.”