The Patient is Permanently Comatose: The Family Wants Everything

This afternoon, I attended a conference from the West Virginia Network of Ethics Committees titled The Patient is Permanently Comatose: The Family Wants Everything. I have found that the resources offered by WVNEC are of a high caliber. The panelists were appropriately diverse: a physician, a lawyer, a priest, and a nurse ethicist. The discussion was balanced between mechanisms to resolve the dispute through communication and mediation, and mechanisms to resolve the dispute once it proved intractable.

As I largely focus on the latter (and much rarer) intractable situation, I was interested to learn that the West Virginia University "Guidelines for Medically Ineffective Treatment" have never been used to withhold LSMT against surrogate wishes. In only three cases did things come close. But even in these cases, while providers told surrogates that they would unilaterally withhold or withdraw (in 72 or 96 hours), upon receiving that news, consented or at least assented to that course of action.