The Physician's Responsibility toward Hopelessly Ill Patients

To the Editor: Wanzer and colleagues' thorough review of the physician's responsibility toward dying patients (March 30 issue) 1 could have been even more helpful in two ways. First, it could have explicitly acknowledged that it is not chiefly the technical aspects of caring for the dying patient that "tax the ingenuity and equanimity of the most skilled health professionals." Rather, it is the existential aspects, because they impinge on the physician as a person, not just as a professional in a social role. The white-coated professional technician is challenged to formulate prognoses with sometimes ambiguous data, to adjust constantly the . . . No extract is available for articles shorter than 400 words.