Family and Limitation of the Therapeutic Effort in Pediatric Intensive Care. Ethical Issues

The fact of improving the quality of life of patients with incurable diseases and prolonging life in extremely serious cases has been related to the problem of defining when it is not ethically correct to prolong the agony. Almost all the medical literature addressing this issue refers to the patient and family’s right to limit a futile therapy and its usefulness to avoid the unnecessary suffering of the patient. However, there is little information on how to act when the ralatives of the terminally ill child insist on continuing futile treatments that will only cause pain and increased suffering, without mentioning the unnecessary expenditure of resources, which puts the physician in a difficult position. This paper presents the criteria derived from the experience in the pediatric intensive care unit, especially those related to the interpretation of the concepts used in this context.