Why a Coma Machine? Online demo Doctors administering strong palliation to terminally ill patients at the end stage of life are obliged to prolong a patients' physical life as long as is necessary to avoid the appearance of ending their life, by accident or design, with the powerful drugs that are required in these circumstances, to avoid possible prosecution. But how long is long enough? One day, 2, 3, 4 days? Clearly 4 days is long enough. But what makes 1 day, or 6 hours, or less, not long enough? In reality, many doctors, judging their patient's (and their family's) ordeal to have proceeded long enough to immunise them from risk of prosecution, and that further prolongation is of no use whatsover to the patient, and both unnecessary and needlessly stressful to their family, administer larger doses than are medically required for strict palliation. They can then claim, in good conscience, that the patient died of their disease, by relying on the doctrine of 'double effect'. Very rarely are these cases subject to any scrutiny, because of the prolonged and public nature of the ordeal to which the patient has been subjected. This form of slow euthanasia allows the fiction to be maintained that doctors do not actively assist their patients to die. Death by ordeal is often not what patients, or their families want, but is regarded as "good medical practice" only to maintain the public fiction upon which the NT Voluntary Euthanasia law was overturned. Who benefits from this practice? Patients who declare they do not want to die in this way, and their family members who concur with them, certainly do not benefit at all. Some family members of patients, consenting or otherwise to this form of death, could be said to benefit in that their grieving needs may have in part been fulfilled. The only certain beneficiaries of this practice are, whether they intended it or not, the doctors involved, and the manufacturers of the often enormous quantities of drugs required. Calibrating a coma machine to administer palliative drugs purely on the basis of the physiological signs of the comatose patient is far 'safer' because it does not rely upon the subjective judgement of the doctor, influenced by fear of possible legal consequence. The coma machine offers terminally ill patients who wish to die, and would otherwise have used voluntary euthanasia had it not been made illegal, a far more reliable guarantee of entering a coma from which they will not awake than administration by a doctor fearful of legal consequence. At least barring 'acts of God' like power or equipment failure during the period required for the patient's biological functions to cease. Under these circumstances some terminally ill patients will certainly elect to make use of it, even though it may delay their physical death considerably longer than a doctor, unaided, ever could. At least they have a credible guarantee of never knowing how long their ordeal lasted. Some may also take comfort from knowing that this barbaric 'last resort', to which the law now relegates the terminally ill, is a problem only on the conscience of those living who deny them the right to choose the time and circumstance of their final moments.