Medical futility has been proposed for many years to define the procedure that simply prolongs the suffering of patients but heals nothing [1] . To deal with the decision procedure for treatment, two ideas arise: patients9 autonomy and doctors9 authority. Widely recognized in 1960s, patients9 autonomy respected patients9 willingness over treatment, requiring specific consent for treatment and r...

BACKGROUND Publicly funded trials regularly fail to recruit their target sample size or find a significant positive result. Adaptive clinical trials which may partly mediate against the problems are not often applied. In this paper we investigate the potential of a form of adaption in a clinical trial - a futility analysis - to see if it has potential to improve publicly funded trials. METHOD...

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...

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...

OBJECTIVES To present an analysis of "futility" that is useful in the clinical setting. DESIGN Literature review. MATERIAL AND METHODS According to Medline more than 750 articles have been published about medical futility. Three criteria (language, time period, and the authors expressed their own opinions) singled out 43 of them. The authors' opinions about futility were analysed using the ...

I N THE COURSE OF CARING FOR A critically ill patient it may become apparent that further intervention will only prolong the final stages of the dying process. At this point, further intervention is often described as futile. There has been controversy in the literature and in clinical practice regarding what constitutes futile intervention. Clinical paradigms of futile care often involve life-...