Abstract
The clinical accuracy of peer-reviewed medical literature is evolving rapidly and with it the potential to learn a great deal about achieving benefit in critical care.1 The advent of the Internet and electronic bulletin boards led to real-time contact with a multinational pool of working physicians, as well as up-to-the-minute data regarding patient care on a multinational platform.2 This has created a new global medical village, in which the furthest citizens reside just around the corner. In 1994, CCM-L (http://ccm-l.med.edu), the first medical bulletin board dedicated to the specialty of critical care medicine, was founded. At the time of this writing, a multinational contingent of about 1000 CCM-L subscribers, including physicians, pharmacists, nurses, other interested providers, medical ethicists, and researchers, access a sophisticated mail server located at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. About half live and work outside the United States. The purpose of CCM-L is to provide a forum to discuss, and to maintain a data bank for, the holistic daily care of the patient as it pertains to the intensive care setting. Included in the discussion are problems associated with limitation, withholding, and withdrawal of life support. CCM-L provided the platform from which the opinions that form this work were drawn.
It would be thought that a form of government based on individual rights and organised by reasonable people would result in a society less contentious than currently is the case. Reasonable people, it would be thought, would understand the need for individuals to tolerate each others needs and indeed to develop an understanding of the mechanisms wherein society can only function in an aura of to lerance. But the opposite appears to be the case. Pecuniary interest in consumer society has destroyed tolerance, setting individual against individual in a competition that inevitably must fail to look after the weakest in society. —George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma
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Crippen, D. (2002). Discussion of the Medical Aspects of Futility. In: Crippen, D., Kilcullen, J.K., Kelly, D.F. (eds) Three Patients. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0939-4_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0939-4_24
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