Whereas in VAE it is the doctor who terminates the patient's life, in PAS he assists the patient to take his or her own life. Assistance may take the form of giving the patient the means to commit suicide, such as supplying a lethal pill to be swallowed or a plastic bag to be put over the head. Or it may take the form of advice about methods, such as which are the most effective. Laws against assisted suicide tend to prohibit not only facilitating suicide (‘Here's a plastic bag to put over your head’) but also encouraging suicide (‘Go on – put the plastic bag over your head and breathe deeply’).

A contemporary and striking example of PAS is provided by the bizarre activities of Dr Jack Kevorkian (or ‘Dr Death’ as the media have dubbed him) in the USA. Dr Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, assisted over forty people to commit suicide in recent years in circumstances which were somewhat removed from regular medical practice. These people travelled to Kevorkian from all over the USA to seek his assistance in suicide. He assisted them, sometimes by attaching them, in the back of his rusting Volkswagen van, to his ‘suicide machine’, which injected them with lethal drugs when they activated it. Despite being prosecuted for assisted suicide on several occasions, Kevorkian escaped conviction and continued his personal campaign for relaxation of the law in his peculiar way.