Moral Dilemma in Medicine

Moral Dilemma in Medicine
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Not too long ago, I was in a country in South America and got to meet some physicians in a hospital. We talked about lots of topics. One of the physicians shared with me the following story.
He said that there was a woman he treated for pain. She was a cancer patient, and he was the pain specialist. She was very elderly and had a sister who was even slightly older than her. They would both come to his care, and he would look at the medication and adjust them to try to take care of her pain. Eventually, she passed away.
Her sister came to see him to say goodbye. She hinted that she was going to take whatever pain medication her sister left and terminate her life. She didn't say it exactly, and he couldn't react to it exactly. Officially, he should have called the psychiatric department to have her committed. But instead, he asked her how many pills there were and made sure they were the right ones. He also asked if she had living family, and she said she had a niece in a town over. He told her to call her niece and tell her because if she took the pills and her niece called her and didn't get an answer, she would call an ambulance, which would take her to the hospital and resuscitate her.
The woman was old, her sister had just died, and she was not healthy herself. There was nothing specifically wrong with her, but she was, I guess, just tired of living. The physician told me about the complexity of giving her advice. On one hand, he thought she was probably making the right decision for herself, but as a physician, he couldn't help her because it's illegal. He also wanted to prevent her from making a mistake that would result in her being resuscitated.
This situation presented a terrible moral dilemma for the physician. He was supposed to report her but probably would have lost her trust and made her life worse rather than better. It made it clear that the questions about end of life are very complex, and we need to elevate our thoughts and have high respect for the people who want their life ended. It's not clear to me that we have the moral right to insist that they keep on living.
I think that we need to not just help them by not reporting them and giving hints, but truly help them. Of course, it's complex because some people we shouldn't help. However, I no longer think that we should have a blanket policy against helping people take their life in a peaceful and calm way.
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