Medical Futility Blog

Readers of this blog may be interested in this  Interdisciplinary End of Life Symposium , on October 7, 2026 on Zoom.  

A recent article  in Bioethics supports my analysis of the permissibility of VSED ("VSED Should Not Be a Pathway to MAID (Though Both A...

I have been collecting and discussing VSED advance directives for years. But with increasing discussion of minimal comfort feeding (MCF), w...

The UK Department of Health & Social Care has prepared a 160-page Impact Assessment  appraising the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) ...

The Saturday Evening Post r eviews several mueums that focus on how we deal with death. "Death is one of the few experiences every huma...

The 2026 NYU Transplant Ethics and Policy Conference convenes leading voices across clinical care, research, law, and patient advocacy to ex...

The World Federation of Right to Die Societies is launching a quarterly magazine . Issue 1 will include Making History: World Federation Tur...

HuMed is a podcast hosted by pediatric emergency physician Dr. David Spiro, exploring the human side of medicine. A recent episode tackles ...

Get ready. The ASBH 2026 Annual Conference is coming up next month  in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Join me on Thursday 10/15/26 at 2:30, for Leg...

Later this week, Illinois becomes the 14th U.S. jurisdiction where medical aid in dying is available. The law was enacted in late 2025, but ...

Articles like this one rightly call for counseling patients about psychedelic therapy (at least in Colorado and Oregon where it's more ...

On October 27, 2026, the Harris County District Court will hear  Texas Children's motion for summary judgment in the case Camp v. Texas ...

This new Romanian book on modern surgical difficulties has a terrific chapter on medical futility: "Therapeutic Proportionality and t...

Five constituional challenges to medical aid in dying statutes are pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second, Third, and Ninth...

NYU's Transplant Ethics and Policy Conference is next month. Join me there.

With new federal regulations and an en banc ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, U.S. clinicians and hospitals usin...

We are contuning our growing line of scholarship on minimal comfort feeding, with "Minimal Comfort Feeding in Advanced Dementia in the ...

University of Alabama law professor Pamela Bucy Pierson has a new article in the Journal of Health & Biomedical Law: " The Ethics...

For several years, the Clinical Ethics Committee of the University Medical Center Götting has been publishing a podcast series "ETHICS...

The 10th International Advance Care Planning Conference  will be in Rwanda from 22–24 September 2027. Information about prior ACP conferenc...

The Medical Futility Blog has reached 7 million pageviews. These are unique instances of internet users visiting particular pages on this b...

The next issue of the Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine is here . The Journal an independent, peer-reviewed journal focused on the clinical...

Australia's Northern Territory Parliament passed voluntary assisted dying (VAD) legislation yesterday. The bill's passage brings th...

My latest article is now available in the September 2026 issu e of American Journal of Bioethics : "Hospital Bioethics: Ample Legal Fo...

Increasingly, around the world, when individuals die from Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED), that is mentioned in their obitua...