solved FUTILITY When if ever should medical interventions be considered “futile

FUTILITY When if ever should medical interventions be considered “futile ”? Do you agree with Bernard Lo that such judgments must be distinguished from judgments about a patient’s quality of life? Should the language of futile care be abandoned altogether or does it have a limited role? 1. In the 1960s there was a change from a cardio-pulmonary definition of clinical death to a whole brain definition. This change was spearheaded by a Harvard ad hoc committee. The Harvard committee argued that such a definition was necessary for two reasons. The improvements in cardiopulmonary support have led to our ability to keep the heart beating of patients whose brains are irreversibly damaged, thereby creating a burden on the patient and the family of the patient. The second reason is that the old cardiopulmonary criteria have made it difficult to obtain organs to transplant. The main problem is that on these old standards, one had to wait for the heart to stop beating before pronouncing death, thereby delaying harvesting of the organs causing them to deteriorate, and making them unsuitable for transplant purposes. However, the new criteria avoids this problem because patients can be pronounced dead while their hearts still beat.