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Porter Storey, MD
New Age Hospice Volunteer Faculty, M. D. Anderson Hospital Baylor College of Medicine Houston

JAMA. 1988;259(14):2095.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—I was distressed by the article in the Jan 8,1988, issue of JAMA entitled "It's Over, Debbie."¹I, too, was a tired gynecologic resident rotating through large hospitals and I saw similar situations and, perhaps, responded no better than our nameless physician. After that, I did three years of internal medicine training that did not help me prepare for managing such difficult problems. I went to the United Kingdom to study how things are done at the University of Edinburgh and at St Christopher's Hospice in London and then became medical director of a hospice. During the past five years I have treated some 2000 terminally ill patients to the times of their deaths, mostly in their own homes but sometimes in our inpatient facility.

I have learned that patients like Debbie do not need to be killed by their physicians to be relieved of their . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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