The Problem with Futility

. . . The notion of futility generally fails to provide an ethically ground for limiting life-sustaining treatment, except in in which narrowly defined physiologic futility can be plausibly. Futility has been conceptualized as an objecitve entity independent the patient's or surrogate's perspective, but differences in values and the probabilities of clinical outcomes undermine its basis. Furthermore, of futility may camouflage judgments of comparative worth that are in debates about the allocation of resources. In short, the problem futility is that its promise of objectivity can rarely be fulfilled. The advance of the language of futility into the jargon of bioethics should followed by an equally rapid retreat.