Patients' voices are needed in debates on euthanasia

A couple of errors slipped into this Education and Debate article by Yvonne Y W Mak and colleagues (26 July, pp 213-5). Omission of two words changed the focus of a reported study: Lavery and colleagues studied the origins of desire for medically assisted death in HIV, not the origins of such deaths (see the second paragraph in the section “Research data on euthanasia”). In the figure, the labelling for the bottom curve was rather confusing: it should say “assumed wholeness before cancer”(not “assumed before cancer wholeness”).