The patient must be adult and in a "futile medical condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated".
All Is Lost, on the other hand, means to ask a very different question: Is the human condition futile?
After several years of grueling tests, misdiagnoses and futile treatments, Daniel's condition was finally diagnosed correctly in 1997 by Dr. Fred Kaplan, a metabolic bone disease specialist at the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Attribution theory — the way an individual attaches meaning to events and behaviors — is fundamental to personality, but in this novel, almost everyone comes to essentially the same conclusion: looking for causality in the human condition is futile.
As gatekeepers, clinicians may seek to protect people for whom they provide care from the perceived burden of research participation and/or an intervention perceived to be futile for an intractable condition [ 3, 4].
Based on three case studies concerning different opinions about treatment options for an older dementia patient, a patient demanding chemotherapy, and a severely ill neonate, conditions for futile life-prolonging treatment were elucidated through NSD.
In this case, a utilitarian perspective may seem to hold appeal as a means of increasing the rate of successful organ retrieval, which may lead to premature withdrawal of active treatments or, on the contrary, to the "strategic" use of futile treatments until the technical conditions for organ retrieval are met.
This small study contributed to elucidating the conditions that underlie futile life-prolonging treatments through NSD among participants of diverse backgrounds.
When move aftermove failed to improve their condition, even hope seemed futile.
Factors for judging a certain treatment futile included medical factors and patient condition, social norms, and cost-benefit considerations.
