Euthanasia as a Social Problem: Attitudes of Medical Staff to Euthanasia

The theme of euthanasia affects the moral and ethical side of the issue which causes multiple debates among society. Recently, the phenomenon of euthanasia is becoming more common around the world. Physicians are a professional group that has certain knowledge in the area of medicine. The availability of knowledge allows doctors to possess some power over the patients. Therefore, there are certain patterns of doctor-patient relationships. Discourse includes both power relationships and knowledge. The theory of discourses is intended to find out the attitudes of medical staff to euthanasia by studying the formation of statements in their speech. This qualitative study reports the attitudes of Russian medical staff toward the phenomenon of euthanasia. Physicians (15) from different areas of medicine participated in the study. The data were collected from semi-structured interviews which were aimed at a comprehensive study of their attitudes to euthanasia.