Resistance is Futile?

Since late 2024 Westminster has debated whether and when English and Welsh patients may hasten their deaths. But what about the opposite situation? How should we handle situations when the patient wants to live but their clinicians determine that continuing life-sustaining treatment is inappropriate, non-beneficial or therapeutically obstinate? These sorts of conflicts have long been common in NHS hospitals. Yet they are increasingly prevalent as families dispute even long-settled medical concepts like brain death. Normally, clinicians defer to patients and families when the decision is value-laden and preference sensitive. But surely clinicians need not comply with "any" demand that patients and families make. What are the proper limits to clinical deference? And how should those limits be adjudicated?

Professor Thaddeus Mason Pope (Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law)

Professor Thaddeus Mason Pope (Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law)

Ranked in the Top 20 most-cited health law scholars in the United States, Professor Pope has over 300 publications in leading medical journals, bioethics journals and law reviews. Pope authors medical jurisprudence topics for The Merck Manual and UpToDate, coauthors the definitive, biannually-updated reference book The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmaking, and coauthors Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate Widely Available Option for Hastening Death. Pope also runs the Medical Futility Blog (with over five million page-views).