The evolution of the patient’s clinical course usually indicates when the time has arrived to discontinue life-sustaining treatment and to allow a patient to die. However, time is not always on the physician’s or the patient’s side. The conscious, alert, and ventilator-dependent patient certainly presents one of the greatest and most difficult challenges to clinicians […]

The principle of proportionality, succinctly stated, affirms that life-prolonging treatments are contraindicated when they cause more suffering than benefit. This principle also comes to expression in the Canadian Law Reform Commission’s recommendation that the Criminal Code should not bind physicians to administer therapeutically useless treatments or treatments that conflict with a patient’s best interests. Other […]

A contemporary consensus
Although saving lives always has been, and will ever remain, a primary goal of clinical practice, the initiation and continuation of intensive life-prolonging procedures may result in little more than a stretching out of the dying curve, or in the extension of an unbearable and unrelentingly miserable life. Over the last 20 years […]

It has been said that the physical therapy profession is defined by a body of knowledge and clinical applications that are directed toward the elimination or resolution of disability.Understanding the disabling consequences of disease, injury, and abnormalities of development and how the risk of potential disability can be reduced, therefore, must be fundamental to the […]