Christopher Johnson has a website about seriously ill and injured children – what their needs are, how we care for them, and what happens to them. One part of the site includes a blog on which Dr. Johnson made the following comments a few days ago:
Doctors often make the argument that we should not prolong suffering. Establishing if a patient is actually in pain can be difficult, and anyway we virtually always have the means to relieve pain in these situations. More telling to me is the argument that families cannot compel physicians to act unethically, and most of us regard futile care as unethical. Yet even then the physician can simply withdraw from the case, although from experience I can tell you it is difficult to find another physician to take on cases like this, and abandoning our patient without finding them another physician is clearly unethical (and illegal).
What to do? I have been involved in several cases like the one Dr. Truog describes. Thankfully, in all but one the family and the doctors were ultimately able to reach an understanding both sides accepted. In the one case in which we could not agree, nature ultimately decided things for us, as she often does.
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