OBJECTIVES Nurses are generally present, and often influential, in supporting patient and family acceptance of medical futility and in assisting doctors in negotiating referral to palliative care. Yet the specificities of the nursing role and how nurses may contribute to timely and effective referrals is not well understood. This study aimed to systematically explore hospital-based nurses' acco...

Purpose of the review—Decisions to withdraw or withhold potentially life-sustaining treatment are common in intensive care and precede the majority of deaths. Where families resist or oppose doctors’ suggestions that it is time to stop treatment it is often unclear what should be done. This review will summarize recent literature around futility judgements in intensive care emphasising ethical ...

BACKGROUND Empirical surveys about medical futility are scarce relative to its theoretical assumptions. We aimed to evaluate the difference of attitudes between laypeople and physicians towards the issue. METHODS A questionnaire survey was designed. Japanese laypeople (via Internet) and physicians with various specialties (via paper-and-pencil questionnaire) were asked about whether they woul...

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...

This report addresses the difficult situation in which a patient or surrogate decision maker wishes cardiopulmonary resuscitation to be attempted even though the physician believes that resuscitation efforts would be futile. It also reviews current controversies surrounding the subject of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders and medical futility, discusses the complex medical, legal, and ethical con...

The Islamic moral code originates from two primary sources: the Quran and the Sunnah (Rady and Verheijde 2014a). Regardless of time and place, this code provides practical and comprehensive guidance on behavioral aspects in health and illness. In Western principlism-based bioethics, medical futility justifies withholding and withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment (LST) based on a subjective d...

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...

In this essay I examine the formal structure of the concept of futility, enabling identification of the appropriate roles played by patient, professional, and society. I argue that the concept of futility does not justify unilateral decisions to forego life-sustaining medical treatment over patient or legitimate surrogate objection, even when futility is determined by a process or subject to et...

Use of life-sustaining or invasive interventions in patients in a persistent vegetative state or who are terminally ill may only prolong the dying process. What constitutes futile intervention remains a point of controversy in the medical literature and in clinical practice. In clinical practice, controversy arises when the patient or proxy and the physician have discrepant values or goals of c...