DEATH STRUGGLE
As someone trained to treat people with cancer, Dr Cameron McLaren is the first to admit his profession has a reputation for not knowing when to stop.
“That reputation is not inaccurate,” he says. “We certainly got it for a reason. And I think a lot of it comes from caring for your patient. You form pretty strong bonds over the weeks, months and years treating their disease, and sometimes you don’t want to let them go.”
However, the medical oncologist from Melbourne now finds himself in a new role that exists somewhat awkwardly “between life and death”, as he puts it, as a practitioner and advocate for assisted dying.
McLaren talks about assisted dying with the lexicon of a tech entrepreneur, combined with the patient-centred approach that is de rigueur these days in medical curricula.
“When the legislation went live, I had nothing to do with it, or advocating for it,” he recalls. “I did the training the night before because I presumed it was something we were going to offer patients. This was going to be a decision they had the right to make, and, to my mind, they had a right to be supported in it. Then I found that no one else had done the training.”
Initially, he was approached to assess patients who weren’t his own, in his capacity as an
