Utility rather than futility in emergency medicine

Futility has no utility in resuscitation medicine.

"Futility" is a word which means the absence of benefit. It has been used to describe an absence of utility in resuscitation endeavours but it fails to do this. Futility does not consider the harms of resuscitation and we should consider the balance of benefit and harm that results from our resuscitation endeavours. If a resuscitation is futile then any harm that ensues will bring about an unfa...

Professionalisation rather than monopolisation is the future of emergency medicine in Europe

The utility of futility.

See related article, pages 2410–2414. In this issue, Palesch et al 1 discuss the single-arm, phase II futility study design and illustrate how its use might have avoided 3 large (and costly) but negative phase III therapeutic trials for ischemic stroke patients. The authors offer strong arguments to support their conclusion that use of this design as a strategy in phase II development “could pe...

Cardiac Mapping: Utility or Futility?

Introduction: Cardiac mapping is a broad term that covers several modes of mapping such as body surface,1 endocardial,2 and epicardial3 mapping. The recording and analysis of extracellular electrograms, reported as early as 1915, forms the basis for cardiac mapping.4 More commonly, cardiac mapping is performed with catheters that are introduced percutaneously into the heart chambers and sequent...

Deprenyl Can Mediate Neuronal Protection Rather than Neuronal Rescue

Background and Objective: Deprenyl is a drug for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, where the dopaminergic neurons are the target of this drug. Several reports also documented that deprenyl has an effect on the sensory and motor neurons. There are some reports about the mode of action of deprenyl on m...