Medical Futility Blog

Estate planning is the process of deciding how your property and personal affairs should be handled during your lifetime, if you become unab...

The Harvard Medical Student Review (HMSR) is a student-founded, student-run, open access medical journal established in 2014 at Harvard Me...

Compassion in Dying UK has updated their information on VSED after the BMA published its new guidance.    CID reports: "Over recent ye...

As part of my Robert C. Nusbaum Visiting Professorship in Law, Medicine and Medical Ethics, I will deliver the following program to the Nor...

France's new MAID law has passed both the legislature and the Constitutional Council. And it has been signed by President Macron. The J...

Few states have efficient processes to make healthcare decisions on behalf of unrepresented patients. But all states have significant number...

After nearly five years, the New Mexico Department of Health has finally published its first annual report on the usage of medical aid in d...

Yesterday, the British Medical Association released a 40-page guidance document ,  Caring for Patients Who Elect to Voluntarily Stop Eating ...

On July 15, 2026, the French National Assembly enacted a MAID law. On August 14, 2026 the Constitutuonal Council  ruled the law constitutio...

It was a pleasure to be on the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging's  Advocates of Aging  podcast  (see also here ).   ...

Hospice News reports on a Koda Health study finding: Women name an adult child as their primary medical decision maker 55% of the time. But ...

Opponents have filed a seventh lawsuit challenging MAID statutes. This one, filed in Chicago, is a hybrid, challenging both the scope of the...

Dejianna Lane was shot in the head ion July 6, 2026. Within a few days, clinicians at Los Angeles General Hospital determined that she was d...

Commentators have long compared human end-of-life care to animal end-of-life care. But these comparisons continue to elucidate underlying pr...

Video-based aids facilitate Code Status Discussions and have been shown to reduce uncertainty and conflict regarding choice of care, increas...

The medical board of the southernmost state in Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, has just issued a new guidance document on resolving medical futi...

In early August 2026, CMS issued a final rule adopting the Advance Care Planning Electronic Clinical Quality Measure (eCQM) starting with ...

A new bill  in Congress, the Compassionate Care Act, would expand advance care planning education of both individuals and clinicians. It wou...

In his latest Medscape video , Art Caplan discusses a medical futility case. He recommended that stopping blood transfusions would be ethica...

Most violations of the dead donor rule are not enforced. When they are, it is usually through state criminal law. But this week, we see fede...

Check out all these recent legal developments concerning the right to die.  We update The Right to Die: The Law of End-of-Life Decisionmakin...

Many hospitalized patients lack decision-making capacity. So, a surrogate decision maker (agent, guardian, default SDM, parent) must make he...

After an opening week of wrenching testimony and a jury trip to the home where Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in 2023, her murd...

Save the date for the MAiD2027 conference . Join CAMAP in Winnipeg, Manitoba for MAiD2027 from April 29 (pre-conference) to May 1, 2027.  

Today's  final rule on Medicare hospice rules acknowledges potential tension between state MAID laws and the federal Assisted Suicide F...