What is the AMA's view on PAS?

• A. Fundamentally compatible with the physician's healer role
• B. Fundamentally incompatible with the physician's role as a healer
• C. Encouraged as standard practice
• D. Irrelevant to ethics

Answer: (B)

The key idea is that medicine is grounded in healing, relieving suffering, and preserving life whenever possible. The AMA views physician-assisted suicide as directly at odds with that healing mission because it involves ending a patient’s life, which conflicts with the physician’s duties of beneficence, non-maleficence, and maintaining trust in the patient–physician relationship. Even when patients experience unbearable suffering, the physician’s role is to provide care that alleviates pain and explores all options—palliative and hospice care—without taking a life. Because of this fundamental conflict between ending life and the physician’s healing identity, the AMA characterizes PAS as fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer.