Welcome to the podcast Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture.

I'm your host Scott Ray, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Christian Ethics at

Talbot School Theology at Biola University.

We're here with our guest today, Dr. Ryan Nash, who is a palliative care specialist physician

and director of bioethics and ethics education at the Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio.

This one of the specialties being in palliative care, I think it makes him especially well qualified

to talk to us about our subject today, which is assisted suicide and its impact on the practice of medicine.

So Dr Nash, also a native Texan, which having grown up in Houston myself, is great. So it's great to have you with us. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me Scott.

So tell me, you know, just in general, how does your Christian faith inform your work as a physician and your work in bioethics?

Well, I think right now in medicine, there's a lot of traction on a concept of moral distress and

burnout compassion fatigue. I in I these are it's common I think it's a misdiagnosis. What moral distress really is is to find, or in war when soldiers were told to kill or drop napalm on this village.

It was something they knew was wrong and they had to do it under orders.

I don't think that's what nurses and doctors are experiencing.

I think they're experiencing the reality. I don't think that's what nurses and doctors are experiencing.

I think they're experiencing the reality of sin and death and suffering in the world and it impacts

their soul.

For non-believing physicians or medical health professionals, it's hard for me to understand how they do what they do without faith.

When we get seasick, we're to look to the horizon.

If there's no horizon, you're just tossed and tossed to and fro.

You're seasick all the time.

So I think one thing that especially dealing with patients with advanced illness, without the hope of Christ, without the reality of the soul with that reality of what death brings, that it is our birth into

the true life, if we're united with Christ.

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