Right to Try and Physician Assisted Suicide: Similar or Different?

"In the last few years, the debate whether terminally ill patients should have access to experimental treatments without governmental supervision has intensified. The so-called “Right-to-Try” (RTT) doctrine has become popular especially in the United States, where the federal parliament passed a bill allowing such practices. As many other policies concerning patients’ autonomy in end-of-life circumstances, the appropriateness of RTT has often been challenged. In this context, some authors recently put forward the argument that states where it is allowed to request physician assisted suicide (PAS) should also necessarily recognize a RTT. In the authors’ own words: “if states can give a terminally ill patient the right to die using medications with 100% probability of being unsafe and ineffective against his/her disease [i.e. the substances used for PAS], they should also be able to grant terminally ill patients a right to try medications with less than 100% probability of being unsafe and ineffective [i.e. ET]”. In this contribution, I will question this argument by underlying three flaws in the authors’ comparison of RTT and PAS. First, there is a fundamental distinction in the nature of the choices between the two situations concerning the (un)certainty of their outcomes. Second, the number of actors (and their potential conflicting interests) involved in these two situations is different. Third, the authors’ understanding of the object of patients’ rights in PAS is partially incorrect. I will conclude by arguing that, although reasons might exist to support RTT, such comparison with PAS is not one of them. "