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- Annique Lelie and Marcel Verweij.
- Health Care Ethics, Office for Research, Education and Advice, Wageningen, The Netherlands. a.lelie@zonnet.nl
- Bioethics. 2003 Feb 1;17(1):21-31.
AbstractThe futility debate may be considered as an effort to provide a clear and justified borderline between physician and patient decision-making authority. In this paper we argue that the search for a definition of futility that provides physicians with a final argument in discussions about life-prolonging treatment, is misplaced. An acceptable and meaningful criterion of futility that satisfies this effort seems impossible. As a consequence, we reject a dichotomous domain of decision-making power as the starting point for definitions of futility. A good decision about withholding life-sustaining treatment should be justified from the perspectives of both physician and patient. In this light, a range of definitions of futility is still useful as it can clarify intuitions that a treatment is inappropriate.
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