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Initiating and Withdrawing Life Support
Abstract
DURING the past century, dramatic changes have occurred in physicians' ability to prolong life. A hundred years ago, little more than rudimentary supportive care could be offered to most critically ill patients. Doctors now choose from a vast array of interventions that, when combined with effective therapies for underlying conditions, often greatly prolong survival. Unfortunately, the quality of the additional life so skillfully sought can range from marginally tolerable to positively miserable.These considerations underscore the importance of a clear ethical framework for making decisions about the initiation and withdrawal of all medical treatments. This paper considers basic and advanced . . .
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Citations
Cited by
Assessing patients' capacities to consent to treatment
Appelbaum, P. S., & Grisso, T. (1988) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198812223192504 · Cited by 1,399
Systematic Review: The Effect on Surrogates of Making Treatment Decisions for Others
Wendler, D., & Rid, A. (2011) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-154-5-201103010-00008 · Cited by 691
The Physician's Responsibility toward Hopelessly Ill Patients
Wanzer, S. H., Federman, D. D., Adelstein, S. J., Cassel, C. K., Cassem, E. H., Cranford, R. E., Hook, E. W., Lo, B., Moertel, C. G., Safar, P., et al. (1989) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198903303201306 · Cited by 434
Metadata
- Authors
- Ruark, J. E., Raffin, T. A., & The Stanford University Medical Center Committee on Ethics*
- Venue
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Massachusetts Medical Society
- Published
- 1988-01-07
- Volume
- 318
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 25-30
- ISSN
- 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-4406
- OpenAlex
- W1985890725
- Cited by
- 280
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 49.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Initiating and Withdrawing Life Support. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1056/nejm198801073180106
- The paper
- Ruark, J. E., Raffin, T. A., & The Stanford University Medical Center Committee on Ethics*. (1988). Initiating and Withdrawing Life Support. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm198801073180106
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
