Helping someone die well is the final act of caring I can give as a doctor

Supporting assisted dying takes nothing away from anyone, but provides enormous comfort to a very small group of people

Claire and Bob have been together so long it’s impossible to imagine one without the other.

He’s a walking – well, waddling – textbook of modern medicine.

With his impressive girth, arthritic hips, diabetes, hypertension and gout, I get to see a lot of Bob.

So it was unusual when it was Claire who presented with some nasty sounding pains.

A flurry of tests and specialists and the answer came back: widespread secondary cancer, manageable but not curable.

The best bet?

A brutal course of chemo to keep the…