All these things would be more or less a perfect description of the everyday life of a terminally ill patient. These things will lead patients to be negative. For example, if a patient has spent most of the past year in the hospital, he/she might attain negative feelings because his/her hospital bill might be racking up, and the patient might be worrying about how he/she is going to pay it. The patient will also begin to feel depressed, a form of negativity, since he/she has been in the hospital for so long that he/she might have been missing out on important family occasions. Most of the reasons why terminally ill patients request doctors to assist them in committing suicide might be caused by problems such as hopelessness because there is no effective treatment, anxiety over doctors' very expensive fees, and regret for their family's burden of taking care of them. .
Some people, however, are opposed to legalizing physician-assisted suicide. One might object that legalizing physician-assisted suicide would be going against the tradition of medicine. As Maine Medical Society's Executive Vice President Gordon Smith stated, "physician-assisted suicide goes against 2,000 years of medical ethics". He backed up his claim by using statements stated in the Code of Medical Ethics. The current edition of the Code of Medical Ethics, a 155-year-old book that governs the practices of doctors both ethically and morally in accordance to laws, prohibits and condemns physician-assisted suicide in very strong language. The opponents of the legalization of physician-assisted suicide believe that the role of a doctor is not to recommend taking away your own life voluntarily, but instead to always to save patients' precious lives by providing the best possible medical treatment available. These people claim that passing a law legalizing physician-assisted suicide violates the principle that doctors should devote themselves to save patients' lives instead of recommending suicide.