Medical Futility Blog

Everyone deserves to face life’s final chapter with dignity, clarity and control. Compassion Legal—the End-of-Life Justice Center at Compass...

Delaware's Silverio/Heather Block End-of-Life Options Act went into effect on January 1, 2026. But the Department of Health and Social S...

For the past few years, Texas began formally collecting and reporting hospital use of the dispute resolution provisions in the Texas Advance...

A new short documentary film shows how Barbara Mancini fought to honor the end-of-life treatment wishes of both her father and mother. Unfo...

The 2026 annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is quickly approaching. The AGS Annual Scientific Meeting is set for April ...

PBS Newshour just ran a story about medical aid in dying (MAID). It focuses on Dr. Charles Blanke and one of his cancer patients. Blanke i...

This recent article in JAMA cautions us to carefully distinguish unresponsiveness from unconsciousness.  "Covert consciousness, the en...

Most of the literature on brain death contestation focuses on contestation by the patient's family. But other clinicians also contest br...

Later this morning, I will present "Conversations in Ethics: Dead Donor Rule Disregarded: Four Pervasive Derelictions (Brain Death, DC...

Some of my newest articles are included in SSRN's summary  of "The Latest Research on Medical Law." And there are other good a...

Here's a new record for me. I attended multiple days of a major professional society conference (SCCM) without using a single slide. Not...

A recent nursing journal article focuses on the ethics of NRP. But I love this quote from a nurse that places matters into a broader conte...

I generally publish and present on VSED in narrower  academic and scholarly venues . So, I was unusually pleased with the big reach of this ...

For the first time, a majority of Medicare decedents (53%) now use hospice. The National Alliance for Care at Home reports  that in 2024, 1....

The Japanese Society of Intensive Care Medicine, Japanese Association for Emergency Medicine, Japanese Circulation Society, and Japanese Soc...

Neurologist Calixto Machado has just published The Controversial Case of Jahi McMath: The Reality of a Suspected Brain-Dead Patient When th...

Here is a video of my presentation, last month, as part of the 2025-26 MacLean Center public lecture series: Brain Death Backlash: Unregene...

Form many years, I have cross-posted this blog to Twitter / X. But that is not happening right now because my X account has been suspended. ...

It is such a pleasure to participate in  ICEL5 . Look, I never tossed my badge from ICEL1 from 12 years ago. Let's see if I still have b...

In 1976, New Jersey materially advanced U.S. end-of-life jurisprudence with the Quinlan case. Now, New Jersey may again be poised to innovat...