Commentary
Medical treatment for the terminally ill: the 'risk of unacceptable badness'
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Correspondence: David Crippen crippen@pitt.edu
Associate Professor, Director, Neurovascular ICU, Department of Critical Care Medicine, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Critical Care 2005, 9:317-318 doi:10.1186/cc3715
Published: 10 May 2005Abstract
When patients or their families rarely request inappropriate end of life care in the ICU for capricious reasons. End of life treatment decisions that only prolong discomfort and death are usually emotional and based on unrealistic expectations. I explore some of those reasons in this paper.