Can healthcare providers obtain judicial intervention against surrogates who demand “medically inappropriate” life support for incompetent patients?
OBJECTIVE: This article analyzes, from a legal perspective, a recent phenomenon involving a clash between the values of attending medical personnel and the instructions of surrogate decision-makers acting on behalf of incompetent patients. Some hospitals have gone to court to challenge decisions by surrogates to continue life support for permanently unconscious or other gravely debilitated patients. Their claim has been that continuation of life support would be medically inappropriate and that the surrogates’ decisions ought to be overridden. These petitions have thus far been rejected. The objective here is to explain those decisions and to predict the outcome of future, similar litigation. DATA SOURCES: The primary data are the judicial decisions and legislation accumulated since the Quinlan case in 1976, regarding the medical handling of dying medical patients. CONCLUSIONS: Judicial rejection of healthcare providers’ claims in the decided cases is explainable under traditional guar
