Critical care medicine
-
Critical care medicine · Apr 1995
Physicians do not have a responsibility to provide futile or unreasonable care if a patient or family insists.
This article was written to argue that physicians are not ethically obligated to provide care which they consider futile, unreasonable, or both, either voluntarily or in response to patient or surrogate demands. ⋯ Although the issue of physician refusal of requested care has not been resolved by case law or legal statute, it is supported by compelling ethical principles. Physicians are not ethically required to provide futile or unreasonable care, especially to patients who are brain dead, vegetative, critically or terminally ill with little chance of recovery, and unlikely to benefit from cardiopulmonary resuscitation.