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Futile Treatment and Conquering Death
- Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 60, Number 3, Summer 2017
- pp. 331-335
- 10.1353/pbm.2018.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
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Pragmatically speaking, there is a stronger case for using the language of “futility” than “potentially appropriate” for end-of-life care. The latter obscures the reality of death as a part of human life. Do patients die because death always wins in the end? Or do they die because physicians run out of ways to treat them? In the end, modern medicine has made the conquest of death its de facto goal. That is a fundamental error, one which the language of “potentially appropriate” is unwittingly supportive of.