Ram Kalbag, neurosurgeon: The problem with neurosurgery is that often there’s no way of communicating to your patients.

You see a patient for the first time, who’s ill, who’s probably confused, who’s been sent from somewhere else. I felt I didn’t know whether the patient wanted me to do something. I just felt that I had to do what I had to do. Because sometimes not intervening is as bad as killing. If you don’t intervene the patient may be left brain damaged which he might not have if you had intervened.

There’s no black and white solution. You don’t know what the chap wants.

What I’ve been interested in is rehabilitation. As a neurosurgeon I felt that I was only doing half the job. We just sent the people who didn’t recover back to the hospital they came from. But when I saw some of the relatives - they said: why did you save his life?

I had one woman who took 15 years to recover. She said: why did you save my life to throw me on the scrap heap?

I saw this misery and when I went around the rehab unit and saw these brain-damaged people lying there and they didn’t know what was going on. . . Mostly it’s the young who survive. And I could see their families. You could see widows who were not widows. It’s often young men who suffer as a result of road accidents.

Quite often because of all this publicity about scientific advance, I think the average person has an inflated idea about what specialist treatment can do. In fact, I’ve been saying for years that although we do intensive care, intensive care does as much harm as good. Yet we’re spending millions of pounds on it.

There are a lot of uncertainties in medicine and where I felt that as a neurosurgeon I should do everything I could, I should throw the book at the patient, as they say, but then what happens when the patient doesn’t come up to the expectations of either the patient himself or his family?

We’re not omniscient. We can’t always say this is what’s going to happen, we go on the balance of probabilities that this is better than the next treatment. Or better than doing nothing. But, of course, quality of life is an individual perception. I wouldn’t want to legislate on that. Look at Stephen Hawking, the scientist, he’s leading, as far as I know, a very happy life, a very productive life – more productive than I who am fit will ever do.

So you can’t generalise. In voluntary euthanasia, the emphasis is on voluntary.