Health Care Provider's Attitude towards Performing Euthanasia on the Elderly

One of the four principles of modern medical ethics is to honor the principle known as patient participation in decision-making related to their own treatment. Euthanasia or "Mercy Killing" refers to the practice as helping a person experiencing a quiet, pain free and comfortable death. Due to the subject being important and few studies available in this area, the current study has been designed, which is a systematic narrative review. Using keyword search about the title or abstract in the databases like Magiran, SID, Medline, Iranmedex for Persian language studies and the articles with their full text in English on the databases as ProQuest, Elsevier, Ovid, PubMed, Science direct using the following key words, the search was done. The Persian words included favorable death, sweet death, good death, easy death. The key words in English language covered Mercy killing, Easy death, Euthanasia with the individual terms aging, older people and the elderly. After searching the available databases with the appropriate key words in two languages as Persian and English and with no time limitation, 56 articles have been obtained. Out of these ones, 38 articles have been selected and analyzed as the most relevant to our desired objectives. The identical studies were excluded and or integrated as much as possible at the investigator's discretion. All those dealing with the dying patients have to be equipped with enough skill and access the sophisticated consultants in the symptomatic treatment and take the due actions, if necessary. Knowing a society health care provider's attitude towards the issue called euthanasia, it is possible to take effective actions through a well-established planning in order to promote the care of the patients about whom euthanasia is set forth.