Optimum Care for Hopelessly Ill Patients

Abstract

When advance life support and maximum therapeutic efforts are continued in a patient who is judged to be hopelessly ill and the anticipated outcome is death, serious medical, emotional, legal and economic questions concerning the justification for continued efforts arise.1 2 3 4 5 The responsible physician and the medical and nursing staff in the intensive-care unit (ICU) as well as the patient's relatives face the dilemma of deciding whether continued maximal efforts constitute a reasonable attempt at prolonging life or whether the patient's illness has reached a stage where further intensive care is, in fact, merely postponing death. Although relatively few such patients . . .