Unnecessary resuscitation found harmful
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is performed on all patients who suffer cardiac arrest whether or not it is appropriate and one doctor says its time to stop this practice. If a terminally ill patient refuses to consent to a do-not-resuscitate order, a physician can still deem it inappropriate medical treatment and refuse to comply with patient wishes, says Rita T. Layson, MD, MA, an internal medicine physician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Layson writes in a recent article in Archives of Internal Medicine that patient choice should not be the most important factor in deciding whether CPR is administered. Rather, the potential suffering and harm to both the patient and health care workers involved is "a more important moral consideration."
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