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It's mentioned several times in the welfare bill that conditons must be "constant" which means those with fluctuating conditions will suffer #TakingThePIP

🧵As a GP with a palliative care interest, I am deeply concerned by the #assisteddyingbill. It not only threatens my vulnerable patients, it is built upon fundamental misconception.10 examples below: 🧵 Sarah Coombes for West Bromwich Sonia Kumar MP for Dudley 🌹 Alex Ballinger MP Care Not Killing Dan Hitchens 👇👇

Myth 1: palliative care is not effective enough. My dying patients pass peacefully if they access early enough palliative care. For complex cases, specialist colleagues can help. But 215,000 die yearly without PC access. Assisted suicide is not the answer to health inequality

Myth 2: death is typically horrific. “He died despite the best palliative care…” – I could cry each time I hear this. It is not true. Palliative specialists can explain how they would have manage difficult cases. Such scare stories had dreadful PC.

Myth 3: Assisted suicide goes hand-in-hand with palliative care. Impact assessments show clear relationship between AS legality and the deprioritising of palliative care funding. AS undermines the ethos of palliative care and causes patients to fear their doctors want them dead.

Myth 4: Assisted deaths are quick and painless. Many died slowly and symptomatically in Oregon after the ingestion of the 100 barbiturate pills required. Experimental lethal drugs can cause the type of death that proponents seek to avoid and that Pall care could have prevented

Myth 5: The public wants it. <50% of the public understands that assisted dying involves the ingestion of lethal drugs, confusing it with palliative care or widely practiced withdrawal of futile treatment. When the meaning was specified, public support fell from 73% to 43%

Myth 6: Doctors Want it. Doctors most involved with palliative care or dying patients are most opposed to Assisted suicide. 75% of Scottish PC doctors would not participate in the dying process and 43% would resign if their organisation undertook assisted suicide. APM survey:

Myth 7: One must have choice to have dignity. When did dignity become about power and agency, rather than about honour and respect? Assisted suicide only gives choice to those on the right side of health inequalities; not to those being made to feel obsolete by the very same law.

Myth 8: Adequate safeguards can protect the vulnerable. We cannot safely legislate for the intentional killing of some citizens. Coercion is too insidious. Abuse is too rife. Capacity too complex & fluctuating. Health inequalities too real. Prognostication too unreliable.

Myth 9: Assisted suicide will prevent non-assisted suicide. Where assisted suicide is legal, total suicide rates have increased with no decrease in nonassisted suicides (Jones, Paton, 2015, South Med J). As a GP, should I be preventing suicides or facilitating them?

Myth 10: Oregon’s law is immune to the slippery slope. Despite Oregonian law restricting physician-assisted suicide only to the terminally ill, since 2010, there have been several cases of assisted deaths for non-terminal illnesses, including arthritis and anorexia nervosa.

The “welfare reform bill” is out and let’s be clear: this is not reform - it is devastating cuts. Disabled people will be made poorer, sicker, and more isolated as a result. That it is a Labour government causing this misery will be a mark of shame on the party for years to come.

NEW PRESS RELEASE FROM DWP "More than 200,000 people with most severe, lifelong conditions to be protected from future reassessment for Universal Credit entitlement." That is a MINISCULE amount of people. That means a far tighter criteria, excluding most in LCRWA.

Must be nice to have the privilege and money to pick and choose what you do when you’re unwell.

The waiting list for ADHD assessments where we are is 11 years with the NHS. Some trusts are not assessing adults. Undiagnosed ADHD comes with a host of negative outcomes. PIP is the only way to pay for the additional costs of ADHD. They find new and exciting ways to punish you.

The restriction of disability support in the bill has raised alarms that the UK government may be violating both its domestic equality duties and its international human rights commitments to disabled people.

Already, I meet patients regularly who want to die because we, society, have failed to provide them with proper, half-decent, or sometimes any, palliative care. Once they receive it, they no longer ask me to end their life. If AD is legalised, they may be pushed into death.

Pushed by the wretched lack of care that makes life unbearable. To those who say, "do both! it's not either/or!", it *has* been either/or for as long as AD has been debated. Dying patients have been failed for decades by inadequate care. Be under no illusions AD will fix this.

It will make the problem go away, literally, as vulnerable people are coerced by lack of proper care into ending their lives prematurely. Coerced by loud, strident, celebrity voices who have a platform & the ear of the prime minister. I work with these patients every day.