Medical ethics--when to stop treatment.

Abstract

Several misunderstandings regarding the question of when to stop treatment are examined by considering two frameworks for sorting out the different dimensions of the question. One framework addresses what is meant, and what is not meant, by 'stopping treatment'. The other plots various strategies of stopping treatment on a continuum of increasing degrees of invasiveness. While significant disagreements remain at important points, there is evidence of an emerging consensus in Western medicine: (1) that palliative care and counselling through the dying process should be increased whenever curative or life-sustaining treatment is curtailed; (ii) that any treatment that is not curative, but merely life-sustaining, should be stopped whenever a patient makes an authentic request to have it stopped; (iii) that genuinely futile treatment should not be offered even if requested; (iv) that much more thought and discussion is required to achieve a workable agreement about the definitions of 'futile' and 'inappropriate' treatment; and (v) that assistance in dying, although profoundly problematic, is no longer unthinkable.