End-of-Life Decisions about Withholding or Withdrawing Therapy: Medical, Ethical, and Religio-Cultural Considerations

End-of-Life Decisions about Withholding or Withdrawing Therapy: Medical, Ethical, and Religio-Cultural Considerations

Towards the end of life, physicians face dilemmas of discontinuing life-sustaining treatments or interventions. In some circumstances, these treatments are no longer of benefit, while in others the patient or family no longer want them. The physician plays an essential role in clarifying the goals of medical treatment, defining the care plan, initiating discussions about life-sustaining therapy...

Considerations regarding withholding/withdrawing life-sustaining treatment.

Rethinking the withholding/withdrawing distinction: the cultural construction of “life-support” and the framing of end-of-life decisions

This paper is a theoretical and empirically informed examination of the naturalist distinction between withholding and withdrawing life-support. Drawing on the history of mechanical ventilation and on a recent Israeli law containing a novel approach to disconnecting life-support at the end of life, it is argued that the design of machines predicates the division line between "active" and "passi...

Ethical aspects of withdrawing and withholding treatment.

Decisions about withdrawing and withholding treatment are common in health care. During almost every encounter between health professionals and patients a decision needs to be made about treatment options. In most cases these choices do not pose any difficulty, for example, starting antibiotics when a patient has an infection. However, decisions not to treat, or to stop treating, raise fundamen...

The withholding/withdrawing distinction in the end-of-life debate

End-of-life decisions are often associated with the perspective of the respiratory specialist. On one side, the physician may be confronted directly with these decisions regarding their own patients with an end-stage respiratory failure caused by a chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). On the other hand, several degenerative pathologies – such as degenerative ...