The term ‘assisted dying’ attempts to convince us that we can always tell when someone is dying. Of course, this could not be further from the truth.

It is not just ‘tricky’, as Joseph Vella Bonnici suggests. There is no scientific way of predicting when someone is going to die. The best clinical prognostication tools are often wrong, even in patients with known advanced terminal cancer.

If you attempt to ‘assist’ dying in an individual who is not, in fact, dying, then, you are not only assisting that person’s death but you are actually causing it.

In the UK, patients diagnosed as ‘dying’ were being put on an assisted dying pathway, the ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’, which resulted in death in a mean of 33 hours. The Pathway was recently discontinued because it was found to be dangerous. Sick elderly patients were being misdiagnosed as dying and their relatives were having to fight, frequently unsuccessfully, to get them off the pathway before they died.