Medical Futility Essay Assignment Paper

The broad ethical concept of medical futility as well as the question on who should define it has increasingly continued to be a matter of debate at levels which have resonated with earlier thinking of Hippocrates and Plato. This problem has made a common presence in the context of resource allocation such as organ transplant allocation. Sometimes patients are given organ transplants which do not have benefits to them. Instead, the organs transplants get rejected once the operation has been done and this may result to death (Jecker, 1998).

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Medical futility refers to certain interventions which are likely to cause significant gains to the patients. Two forms of medical futility can be recognized: qualitative futility and quantitative futility. Qualitative futility refers to situations where an intervention is expected to produce very poor quality benefit to patients while quantitative futility is when there is a poor likelihood that the medical interventions will surely benefit the patient. Examples of these interventions include the life-sustaining interventions particularly for patients in vegetative condition, use of chemotherapeutic treatments in terminal cancers, use of artificial hydration or antibiotics for patients with advanced illness and the resuscitation efforts for those who have potential life-threatening conditions (Jecker, 1998).