Dilemmas in Intensive Care Medicine: An Ethical and Legal Analysis

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Abstract
The high-technology medicine available in today's intensive care setting not only provides near miraculous benefits for some patients, but it also creates new and troublesome ethical and legal dilemmas for patients and practitioners. Standards for access to and discharge from the intensive care unit, "do not resuscitate" orders, determination of death, organ retrieval, advanced directives, decision-making capacity, and substantive and procedural guidelines for termination of treatment in incompetent patients are among the problems. Those issues, along with the emerging question of withholding nutrition and fluids, are discussed in this article.

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