A 27-year-old woman in Brazil suffers from bilateral trigeminal neuralgia, which has been described as one of the most painful diseases in medicine, and the onset of the disease will have a lightning-like sharp pain on her face, which can last for minutes to hours, and the density can range from several times a day to hundreds of times.
The woman, Carolina Arruda Leite, has been suffering from bilateral primary trigeminal neuralgia for many years, and the incidence of this disease is 4 to 5 out of 100,000 people. It has been reported that if you are unfortunate enough to suffer from this disease, you will experience severe lightning-like pain in your cheeks, lips, gums and jaw from time to time, sometimes several times a day, sometimes hundreds of times a day, and the duration of each time can be as short as a few seconds, or as long as minutes or even hours, which greatly affects your life.
Leiter said that she has undergone four surgeries in the past 11 years and tried different medications, but all in vain, and her biggest wish now is to go to Switzerland to receive euthanasia, with the goal of raising 150,000 Brazilian dollars (about 210,000 Hong Kong dollars), and has raised about one-fifth of it.
The reason why LET chose to go to Switzerland for euthanasia is because it is not allowed in Brazil, and it is even regarded as a criminal offense equivalent to murder. At present, there are only a very few countries in the world that allow voluntary euthanasia, including Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and certain states in the United States.
Voluntary euthanasia has been controversial in the international community, and there have been many cases in the past that have been considered problematic, including in 2012, a pair of twin brothers who were about to lose their sight and could not bear to see each other, and their application for euthanasia was approved; In 2014, an application for euthanasia was granted because the results of sex reassignment surgery were not as expected. In 2016, a 17-year-old terminally ill patient proposed euthanasia and was approved, becoming the first case of a minor in Belgium to legally receive euthanasia, and once attracted global media attention.