Neurological illnesses can leave patients unable to make legally valid decisions about their medical treatment. However, this loss of decision making capacity can often be predicted in advance. The law in the UK now enables ...

OBJECTIVES: To explore attitudes and reasoning among Swedish physicians and the general public regarding the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment at a competent patient's request. DESIGN: A vignette-based postal ...

A lot of medical procedures can be justified in terms of the number of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) they can be expected to generate; that is, the number of extra years that the procedure will provide, with the ...

Although the incidence of the use of life-ending drugs without explicit patient request has been estimated in several studies, in-depth empirical research on this controversial practice is nonexistent. Based on face-to-face ...

Life-sustaining therapy (LST) is commonly withdrawn in critical care units. Little is known about the families' perceptions of death when a critically ill patient dies after LST is withdrawn. The purpose of this study was ...

End-of-life decision making frequently occurs in the intensive care unit (ICU). There is a lack of information on how a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order affects treatments received by critically ill patients in ICUs. The ...

One objective is to state more accurately the difficulties met by the anaesthesiologists in an emergency context in case of withholding or withdrawing life sustaining therapies.

OVERVIEW: Patients and family members often aren't aware that the use of life-support interventions at the end of life-when the body's systems and organs are failing-can have unintended consequences. Nurses need to be ...

This paper presents the medical practice according to the occidental philosophy (Platon, Spinoza, Kant). Relationships with the concept of "love" (eros, philia, agape) will be described, and the concept of dignity and ...