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Witholding/Withdrawing Patient Treatment

The Practice of Witholding or Withdrawing Patient Treatment

The health care reform movement of the past decade has focused on standardizing protocols and reducing health care costs. As a result, some patients have had treatment withheld from them, or withdrawn from them, in ways that have created controversy. In other instances, patients have asked to have treatment withheld from them in certain specific situations, or life-support withdrawn if they have no possibility of revival. The right-to-die movement has worked to make physician-assisted suicide a possibility for terminal patients. These are all difficult issues, however, and public debate about them has revealed a wide range of opinions.

Treatment is customarily withdrawn or withheld only from those who are judged terminally ill or futile to treat or as having little potential for quality of life even given the best treatment. For example, treatment has increasingly been withheld from infants with severe handicaps, including mental impairments, when parents judge that such treatment will leave their child with little or no quality of life. This has some court support through such decisions as that in the Baby Doe case (Dyck, 1994).

Legally, right-to-die movements have not been particularly successful, howver, with only Oregon currently having legislation on the books allowing physician-assisted suicide. At the same time, there seems to be a great deal of public support for assisted suicide, if polls are to be believed (State laws on assisted suicide, 1999).

This leaves open a wide range of cases in which individuals are either terminal or in vegetative states, and are unable to terminate their own lives for various reasons. Some may not have access to means for such termination, while others may want to die in some comfort and surrounded by friends and family. These are individuals who are kept alive by medical science, sometimes against their own ...

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Witholding/Withdrawing Patient Treatment. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:18, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691533.html