RT Article
T1 A Costly Separation Between Withdrawing and Withholding Treatment in Intensive Care
JF Bioethics
VO 28
IS 3
SP 127
OP 137
A1 Wilkinson, Dominic
A1 Savulescu, Julian
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2014
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1781885133
AB Ethical analyses, professional guidelines and legal decisions support the equivalence thesis for life-sustaining treatment: if it is ethical to withhold treatment, it would be ethical to withdraw the same treatment. In this paper we explore reasons why the majority of medical professionals disagree with the conclusions of ethical analysis. Resource allocation is considered by clinicians to be a legitimate reason to withhold but not to withdraw intensive care treatment. We analyse five arguments in favour of non-equivalence, and find only relatively weak reasons to restrict rationing to withholding treatment. On the contrary, resource allocation provides a strong argument in favour of equivalence: non-equivalence causes preventable death in critically ill patients. We outline two proposals for increasing equivalence in practice: (1) reduction of the mortality threshold for treatment withdrawal, (2) time-limited trials of intensive care. These strategies would help to move practice towards more rational treatment limitation decisions.
K1 Resource Allocation
K1 Health Care Rationing
K1 Medical Ethics
K1 withholding treatment
K1 intensive care
DO 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2012.01981.x