Life Sustaining Treatment

AMA Code of Medical Ethics’ Opinions on Care at the End of Life

The social commitment of the physician is to sustain life and relieve suffering. Where the performance of one duty conflicts with the other, the preferences of the patient should prevail. The principle of patient autonomy requires that physicians respect the decision to forgo life-sustaining treatment of a patient who possesses decision-making capacity. Life-sustaining treatment is any treatment that serves to prolong life without reversing the underlying medical condition.

Coronavirus: it is morally indefensible for a nation to keep life-saving drugs for itself

The world eagerly awaits new vaccines and drugs to combat COVID-19. To deal with a global pandemic, the production of new treatments needs to be scaled up towards supplying the whole world – and as quickly as possible. Borderless open and collaborative science and the free exchange of knowledge and data will get us to vaccines and cures faster than by any other way.

Decision-making conversations for life-sustaining treatment with seriously ill patients using a Danish version of the US POLST: a qualitative study of patient and physician experiences

After participating in a conversation about life-sustaining treatment using the Danish POLST form, a total of six patients and five physicians representing different settings and age groups participated in an interview about their experience of the process.

Doctors Say They Would Shun Aggressive Treatment When Near Death

Everybody dies. But when doctors' time is up, they are different from the rest of us. They "go gently" rather than opt for aggressive end-of-life treatments, as one physician wrote a few years ago. They have seen the suffering of their patients at the end of life and want no part of it.

End-of-life discussions reduce the utilization of life-sustaining treatments during the last three months of life in cancer patients

Studies to examine the impact of end-of-life (EOL) discussions on the utilization of life-sustaining treatments near death are limited and have inconsistent findings.

Study: Doctors' Word Choice Affects End-of-Life Decisions

People were 20 percent more likely to choose DNR if it was phrased as "allowing natural death;" 25 percent if they were told it's what most other people choose.

The breadth of life-sustaining treatment

As with all things geriatrics and palliative, there is no right or wrong answer. But the more I care for patients at different stages of their lives (whether a frail 66yo, a robust 85yo, a dying 73yo), the more I realize that I’m generally not the one who defines where living and dying blend and where ‘natural death’ begins (if ‘natural death’ is what my patient chooses).

The ethics of forgoing life-sustaining treatment: theoretical considerations and clinical decision making

Withholding or withdrawing a life-sustaining treatment tends to be very challenging for health care providers, patients, and their family members alike. When a patient’s life seems to be nearing its end, it is generally felt that the morally best approach is to try a new intervention, continue all treatments, attempt an experimental course of action, in short, do something.

Withholding and Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Treatment

Withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining therapies is ethical and medically appropriate in some circumstances.

When the Treatment of Last Resort Sends a Life Into Limbo

‌This scenario does not occur often and when it does, it plays out behind closed doors. But as our medical technology races forward — creating ethical quandaries like this one — we need to examine cases like these, to ask tough questions about our responsibility to our patients and what it means to do no harm.