Scientists have announced a huge breakthrough that could have provided help for Brittany Maynard, the cancer patient who received national attention over her plan to kill herself under Oregon’s assisted suicide law. Cancer patients and pro-life groups tried to talk her out of the decision but Maynard said she didn’t want to deal with the pain and other effects from her brain cancer.
After suffering from severe headaches, Brittany Maynard found out she had stage II glioblastoma multiforme and had up to ten years to live. However, after she had surgery, doctors found out that she had the most deadly form of brain cancer, stage IV glioblastoma multiforme. The cancer usually kills its victims in a matter of months.
After her diagnosis, Brittany decided that she wanted to move from her California home to Oregon so that she could have access to the “death with dignity” prescription.
Now, the most recent episode of 60 Minutes explored the ‘near miraculous’ treatment regime that has actually brought remissions for Gliobalstoma cancer, (Brittany Maynard’s cancer) as recently as November proclaimed to be “hopeless and incurable.”
“This amazing story is both groundbreaking and tragic,” said Clinical Psychologist Dr. Mark Hoffman, spokesman for California Seniors Against Suicide. “If Brittany Maynard, who had been convinced to end it all, would have just waited until Spring the amazing hope now being offered in this landmark study would have opened a new world of hope to this attractive and vibrant, yet clearly depressed young woman.”
The story by 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley, is available here. The unheard-of treatment regime actually uses polio to attack the cancer. The body’s immune system then attacks the ‘infected’ cancer. Clinical trials have now been refined so that the most recent participants have become ‘cancer clear’ and are in remission.
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Maynard’s condition and her request for suicide in California has become a centerpiece for a concerted, mediagenic focus on changing the law.
“This amazing turn of events only underscores the need to not simply surrender to depression and suicidal ideation, which is in fact a desperate cry of emotional need, not physical,” said Hoffman in an email to LifeNews.
Hoffman continued in his email to LifeNews.com: “It is very common for those with terminal diagnoses to make such requests which is why Kubler-Ross wrote her landmark book in the 1960’s “On Death and Dying'”. “It is very clear acceding to, and offering patients intentional killing, does not help a patients emotional need when they make such requests. In fact you don’t even address the real cry for emotional support and significance such requests have always indicated. Kubler-Ross was very clear, we must walk them through the now famous ‘five stages of emotional growth,’ and it is then that we see contentment and emotional peace and resolve, sometimes accompanied by actual physical improvement. The latter is not guaranteed, but the emotional care and involvement is what does bring comfort when accompanied by physical comfort care. ”
‘It is an insult to her memory to allow, unexamined, the continued promotion of Brittany’s death as an emotional tool too change current law to authorize medicine for killing, and approve 3rd party agents involvement in suicide, without any culpability or investigation,” said Hoffman.
He concluded: “This practice has been discouraged and prohibited by law for centuries and for good reason. In every jurisdiction in which this new law is put in effect, Oregon, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland, abuses and killing of the non-terminal are documented and are taking place. And like Brittany Maynard, those who though diagnosed, might otherwise live for years, are simply encouraged to jump over the cliff of lethal action.”
