Futility and the common cold. How requests for antibiotics can illuminate care at the end of life.

Abstract

The dominant approach to futility in medicine assumes that the probability and utility of medical interventions may be separated to provide a quantitative (probabilistic) definition of futility. This assumption is not only misleading but also responsible for much of the confusion that futility has engendered in medical discussions. The divorce of utility from probability is the opposite of how clinicians reason: an improbable intervention looks different if it is cheap, easy, and without morbidity than if it is technology intensive, expensive, and likely to involve great pain and suffering. Futility is how physicians describe the sense of being compelled to proceed with resource intensive care for marginal benefits. Outside the intensive care unit, physicians weigh and sometimes reject patient requests without the need to invoke futility. By examining the ways that physicians can legitimately evaluate patient requests, we can show that appeals to futility are both unnecessary and counterproductive. In cases where such appeals are unavoidable, the outpatient model suggests a process to adjudicate the competing claims of patient autonomy and physician responsibility.