Physician-Assisted Suicide and Patients with HIV Disease

Abstract

As a physician working in an AIDS hospice in London, I was surprised to read of the high rate of physician-assisted suicide among patients with AIDS in San Francisco as reported by Slome et al. (Feb. 6 issue).¹ Six hundred patients with human immunodeficiency virus disease are admitted each year to our hospice, yet there has been only one request for euthanasia in the past three years. Clearly, a number of factors may account for this difference, but I believe the most important is the lack of palliative-care services in the United States as compared with the United Kingdom.