Two US courts of appeals have ruled that competent, terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. The cases are now before the US Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a ruling ...

The authors discuss state court decisions and statutes that address the refusal of artificial feeding by competent patients and the withholding of artificial feeding from incompetent patients. These decisions, the ...

The assumptions underlying the SUPPORT study may be incorrect. Informed patients may want interventions that other people regard as inappropriately aggressive.

Decisions on providing or withholding care for incompetent patients were traditionally made jointly by physicians and family members. Living wills represent a second approach, and now a third approach--the durable power of ...

We do not like the idea of doctors and nurses being forced to provide care that offends their sense of themselves and their art. But we like even less the idea of physicians allocating resources without the force of society's ...