Little Hope for Medical Futility

Buddhism and medical futility.

Religious faith and medicine combine harmoniously in Buddhist views, each in its own way helping Buddhists enjoy a more fruitful existence. Health care providers need to understand the spiritual needs of patients in order to provide better care, especially for the terminally ill. Using a recently reported case to guide the reader, this paper examines the issue of medical futility from a Buddhis...

Tackling medical futility in Texas.

n engl j med 357;1 www.nejm.org july 5, 2007 was an 18-month-old boy who had Leigh’s disease, a progressive and fatal neurometabolic disorder. He had been on life support in the intensive care unit for 5 months. The hospital had invoked the Texas Advance Directives Act, which authorized it to withdraw life support if an ethics committee had determined that further life support was medically ina...

The Futility of Medical Necessity

he past few years in health care have been a story of extraordinary turbulence. After decades of uncontrolled cost escalation, the businesses and governments that directly pay for most health care finally mandated a fiscal restraint that, in the early 1990s, launched in earnest the upheaval known as “managed care.” One major result has been the replacement of such values as, “If it might help a...

Medical futility: a futile concept?

Defining Medical Futility and Improving Medical Care

It probably should not be surprising, in this time of soaring medical costs and proliferating technology, that an intense debate has arisen over the concept of medical futility. Should doctors be doing all the things they are doing? In particular, should they be attempting treatments that have little likelihood of achieving the goals of medicine? What are the goals of medicine? Can we agree whe...