Witholding/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 As a result, some patients have had treatment withheld from them, or withdrawn from them, in ways that have created controversy.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instances, patients have asked to have treatment withheld from them in certain specific situations, or life-support withdrawn if they have no possibility of revival.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Treatment is customarily withdrawn or withheld only from those who are judged terminally ill or futile to treat or as having little potential for quality of life even given the best treatment.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 s

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rents right to privacy in the matter and allowed them to make that decision which allowed their child to die. This controversy about Baby Doe, in 1982, provided the foundation for medical decisions currently being made about handicapped infants (Dyck, 1994). Handicapped individuals have expressed fear that the precedent it set, along with other changes in society, could support a gradual move toward euthanasia for other handicapped members of society, including adults. In other words, the court cases are ambiguous to date. They do not provide absolutely clear ethical or legal guidance for individuals attempting to make difficult decisions. While they seem to have distinguished, to date, between withholding or withdrawing treatment, and physician-assisted suicide, there are those who contend that there is no substantial difference between the two in legal terms (Physician-assisted suicide, 1992). This argument holds that the "double effect" principle is an ethical guideline developed from natural law and from the Christian religious tradition. It is not a legal principle, nor is it consistent with current legal principles. Instead, the physician is expected to carry out all treatments necessary to preserve the life of his
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Baby Doe, Ethical Issues, McMahon Koch, HCFA Medicaid, Supreme Court, Arthur Dyck, Doe Dyck, According Brody, Treatment Introduction, Nancy Cruzan, physician-assisted suicide, health care, double effect, withdrawing treatment, withholding withdrawing, withholding withdrawing treatment, assisted suicide, withholding treatment, koch 1999, et al, dyck 1994, mcmahon koch 1999, treatment seriously ill, treatment terminally ill, withholding treatment terminally,
Approximate Word count = 2920
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)