[kcvl]

"Felos ... was a founding member of the National Legal Advisors Committee on Choice in Dying, and served as Board Chair of The Hospice of the Florida $uncoast. Where did the phrase "choice in dying" come from? Well, there was an organization called the Euthanasia Society of America which changed its name to "Choice in Dying" which no longer exists - it merged into the "Partnership for Caring" which was founded by Ira Byock, MD. Mary Labyak is corporate Secretary and Treasurer of Partnership for Caring.

George Felos is a student of Ira Byock, MD (a well known hospice physician) who advocates adding "aid in dying" (through terminal sedation) to the mix of "services" provided by hospices.

Byock is a big proponent of using "terminal sedation" to kill patients by sedating them into a coma and letting them dehydrate to death.

Felos has a long history of fighting for the right to kill patients (oh, should we say "right to die?") Right-to-kill organization "Compassion in Dying" directly cites Felos' efforts to kill Terri as an act of "compassion."

[windchime]

The logos and links are ironically dead on this and won't copy, so I've typed them.   

Transforming the Culture of Dying                PDIA  (Project on Death in America)

Profiles of PDIA-Funded Researchers and Projects

Exerpt:    (located below midpage)

Ira Byock, M.D.
Barbara K. Spring, M.D.
As a hospice physician and medical director, Dr. Ira Byock is only too aware of the difference between a "good" death and a "bad" death, and the fact that the latter far outnumber the former. But instead of working only with the medical profession to reverse this equation, he and gerontologist Dr. Barbara K. Spring set out to engage an entire Montana town in examining the dying process and making it better. The Missoula Demonstration Project: The Quality of Life's End is the most ambitious effort of its kind in the United States. Modeled after a famous long-term heart disease study which collected data on an entire community, the 15-year Missoula Demonstration Project aims not only to improve the quality of life's end in Missoula, but to stimulate other efforts throughout the country. Organized in 1996, and overseen by an international advisory committee, the project is engaged in several studies to understand people's experiences, attitudes, values, customs and concerns about death. By looking at 250 families which experienced a death within a one-year period, for instance, and by gathering data in all health-care settings that treat or care for dying people, researchers hope to create, as Byock puts it, an "intensive, high-definition picture of dying, death and bereavement in Missoula." "Our approach," says Barbara Spring, "is to focus on what people seem to worry about the most-pain, the length of the dying process, isolation, and other things that make them miserable."