Refusing Life-Sustaining Treatment After Catastrophic Injury: Ethical Implications

Abstract

...We review a complex case that highlights the difficulty in evaluating capacity to refuse life-sustaining treatments in the rehabilitation setting. As we shall see, the determination of this patient's capacity hinges on diverse factors, including depression, physician countertransference, and the ethos of disability and rehabilitation medicine. Although factors specific to the context of disability deserve careful examination in evaluations of capacity, we do not think, in this case or in general, that disabled patients should be held to a different standard of capacity than other patients.