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A Physician’s Sacred Duty — To Care or to Kill?

Image: The Doctor's Visit, by Jan Steen, 1660s, via Wikimedia Commons.

The culture of death wrongly interprets the term compassion to mean “to get rid of” rather than its true meaning, “to suffer with.” On a new episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson welcomes hospice physician Howard Glicksman to the podcast to discuss physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, the subjects of 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. Find the podcast and listen to it here.

Dig Deeper

  • Get a copy of Richard Weikart’s new book, Unnatural Death.
  • Watch Eric Anderson’s recent interview with Dr. Weikart about his book Unnatural Death:

Andrew McDiarmid

Director of Podcasting and Senior Fellow
Andrew McDiarmid is Director of Podcasting and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He is also a contributing writer to MindMatters.ai. He produces ID The Future, a podcast from the Center for Science & Culture that presents the case, research, and implications of intelligent design and explores the debate over evolution. He writes and speaks regularly on the impact of technology on human living. Discovery Institute co-founder and bestselling author George Gilder has called McDiarmid "a scintillating venturer beyond the surfaces of technology to their hidden depths and meanings." His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Post, Houston Chronicle, The Daily Wire, San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, Newsmax, The American Spectator, The Federalist, Technoskeptic Magazine, and elsewhere. In addition to his roles at the Discovery Institute, he promotes his homeland as host of the Scottish culture and music podcast Simply Scottish, available anywhere podcasts are found. Andrew holds an MA in Teaching from Seattle Pacific University and a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Learn more about his work at andrewmcdiarmid.org.

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assisted suicideend of lifeEric AndersoneuthanasiahospiceHoward GlicksmanID the Futurepalliative carephysician-assisted suicidephysicianspodcastsRichard WeikartUnnatural Death