How long have there been so-called hospital "Ethics" committees? We had an interesting case seven years ago when our mother was in the hospital and didn't wake up after a major operation. After a month or so, one doctor in the professional group, who came in on the weekly staff rotation and became the primary treating physician for the week, led the charge to begin denying care.
They never actually called it an ethics committee meeting or even actually called it a meeting at all (just "can we talk next Tuesday?") but we walked in and there was a room full of medical people on one side, unanimously for death, and our entire family on the other side of the room, unanimously for life. The phrase they kept using was "medically unethical treatment" and "futility".
All we could get from them was "authorization" that they would transfer her IF we should we be so lucky as to find -- within 72 hours -- another hospital in the country that would claim that they could successfully treat her, and would also do so without charge (since the first hospital had hit Medicare's standard "diagnosis group" charges limit).
The immediately put a DNR on her chart, but said they would suspend it for 48 hours to give us a chance. Needless to say, she died about 48 hours later while I was calling around.
That's the first I had ever heard of the "futilitarian" model of medical care, and I just had never heard of any of this.
I sure would love to see that chart....
+Memory Eternal+
Although, to be factual, it has long been a practise to "snow" those who are imminently dying. And those of us in the field have long agreed with it when we saw it happening.
Because in the old times it was happening to people who were very much approaching death and suffering. There was a common sense to it that we trusted and found to be an act of caring.