BACKGROUND A bill to legalise assisted dying in the UK has been proposed in Parliament's House of Lords three times since 2003. The House of Lords Select Committee concluded in 2005 that 'the few attempts to understand the basis of doctors' views have shown equivocal data varying over time'. Fresh research was recommended to gain a fuller understanding of health sector views. AIM To examine G...

In The BMJ this week, two experts discuss whether the Assisted Dying Bill, to be debated at the House of Commons next month, would provide adequate protection for vulnerable people from harm. The new Bill, presented by Mr Rob Marris MP, proposes legislation that would allow doctors to help terminally ill and mentally competent adults to die by prescribing drugs that patients would administer th...

LMOST all patients want their family members to make decisions about life-sustaining treatment for them if they become incompetent.1,2 Asking family members to make such decisions is standard clinical practice and has strong ethical justification.3-5 However, dilemmas arise when family members disagree about life-sustaining treatment. In an important, unanimous decision, the California Supreme ...

BACKGROUND When a new intervention or drug is developed, this has to pass through various phases of clinical testing before it achieves market approval, which can take many years. This raises an issue for drugs which could benefit terminally ill patients. These patients might set their hopes on the experimental drug but are unable to wait since they are likely to pass away before the drug is av...

the aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of mg deficiency and effect of aminophylline infusion on urine magnesium concentration after magnesium loading test (mlt). to determine serum mg, venous blood specimens were obtained just before the first mlt. two mlts were performed. the first one was done before starting aminophylline infusion and the 2nd one was done during aminophyllin...

The present essay scrutinizes the application of discrete mollification as a filtering procedure to solve a nonlinear backward inverse heat conduction problem in one dimensional space. These problems are seriously ill-posed. So, we combine discrete mollification and space marching method to address the ill-posedness of the proposed problem. Moreover, a proof of stability and<b...