Some patients have no chance of surviving if not treated, but very little chance if treated. A number of medical ethicists and physicians have argued that treatment in such cases is medically futile and a matter of physician discretion. This paper critically examines that position. According to Howard Brody and others, a judgment of medical futility is a purely technical matter, which physician...

Methods Observational study in the time interval from July 2013 to December 2014 (18 months). We prospectively registered all patients refused to admission in our unit, then we analyze the clinical refusal report used in our hospital. From these reports we extracted several variables: demographical (age, sex), origin (emergency room, hospital), clinical (comorbidity), functional situation (base...

Methods NEO-ESCAPE was a randomised two arm phase II study in inoperable ovarian cancer designed as an external pilot to inform a future phase III randomised controlled trial. The primary objective was to assess the feasibility of two new extended chemotherapy regimens with 44 patients required on each arm. If one or both treatment arms proved feasible, the trial would continue to recruit to th...

Every U.S. state has developed legal rules to address end-of-life decision making. No law to date has effectively dealt with medical futility--an issue that has engendered significant debate in the medical and legal literature, many court cases, and a formal opinion from the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. In 1999, Texas was the first state to adopt a law...

In para. 3 lie states that judging health solely from a table and without any other aid, and that too by a non-medical official, is very likely to lead to disastrous results, and in para. 9 he refers to the "futility of getting a table of weights to do the work of the Medical Officer. " Every one would agree with Dr. MacNamara in this, but it is not clear why he should have considered it necess...

The concept of medical futility has come to be seen in some quarters as a value-neutral trump card when dealing with issues of power and conflicting values in medicine. I argue that this concept is potentially useful, but only in a social context that provides a normative framework for its use. This social context needs to include a broad consensus about the purpose of medicine and the nature o...

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing futility i...

variability of tidal volume and respiratory rate in normally breathing man has long been demonstrated [1]. however because of lack of knowledge and technology primary ventilators could only deliver a fixed tidal volume in a fixed rate the so called volume controlled ventilation (vcv). vcv was volume preset time triggered and cycled and there was no synchronization with patient’s breaths. at tha...