Clinical and Ethical Approaches to Medical Futility in End-of-Life Care: A Scoping Review
Gustavo Monsalve-Morales, Jacobo Echeverri-Hoyos, Jaime A Echeverri Franco, Eduardo Tuta-Quintero · 2026
Read Clinical and Ethical Approaches to Medical Futility in End-of-Life Care: A Scoping Review by Gustavo Monsalve-Morales, Jacobo Echeverri-Hoyos, Jaime A Echeverri Franco, Eduardo Tuta-Quintero (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13345727.txt.
Description
Gustavo Monsalve-Morales and colleagues mapped in 2026 how clinicians and ethicists handle medical futility at the end of life. When treatment can no longer help a person with terminal illness, decisions grow fraught, partly because futility itself lacks one agreed definition and is applied unevenly across settings.
Following established scoping review methods, the team gathered 36 published studies, mostly retrospective observations and qualitative work. They sorted the clinical, ethical, and prognostic criteria that shape choices about stopping or withholding therapy in adults with limited life expectancy. The synthesis offers teams a clearer shared language for honest talks with patients and families when further treatment would burden without benefit.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gustavo Monsalve-Morales, Jacobo Echeverri-Hoyos, Jaime A Echeverri Franco, Eduardo Tuta-Quintero |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 32 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |