Kill the Pain, Not the Patient - Margaret Somerville — THE MARK: I'm adamantly against killing the person with the pain, that is, euthanasia, and passionately in favour of killing the pain. So I argued that to implement that latter goal in practice, we should recognize that people in pain have a 'fundamental human right' to have reasonable access to pain management and that unreasonable failure to provide such access was a breach of their human rights. And that is precisely what the Declaration of Montreal would establish.
The declaration will function as an ethics guide in relation to pain management and an educational tool for health-care professionals and trainees. Sometimes it will be used as evidence to justify giving necessary pain relief treatment, when others would prevent that. In particular, it will help to overcome the harmful beliefs of some health-care professionals who withhold pain management because they fear legal liability or that patients will become addicted. It will deliver a strong message that it's wrong not to provide pain management, not wrong to provide it.
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