Promoting Authentic Hope
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Disciplines
Critical Care Nursing | Medicine and Health Sciences | Nursing
Abstract
This essay explores how dominant assumptions about hope in American culture often exacerbate the practice of pursuing medically futile treatments.
Description of What’s the Point?: This collection of essays is about the awesome and painful decisions that often must be made when a life is nearing its end. The participants in these decisions include medical caregivers, family, and, when possible, patients themselves. Everyone wonders whether further aggressive medical treatment is advisable; they think it may be futile or even harmful. Should the emphasis in care switch to providing comfort for the remainder of life, rather than continuing a struggle that cannot be won? That such a switch should be made has been conceded by almost everyone who has written about end of life care in the past forty years. Understandably, however, it is one thing to make this argument in a classroom or journal and another thing to act on it. In these essays we hope to describe the textures of seemingly pointless treatment in various care settings and to identify a set of relevant and often controverted variables.
Recommended Citation
Beste, Jennifer. "Promoting Authentic Hope." In What's the Point? Clinical Reflections on Care That Seems Futile, edited by David H. Smith, Charles McKhann, Christiana Peppard, Thomas Duffy, and Stanley Rosenbaum. New Haven: Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics Working Group on Medical Futility, 2007.
Comments
Full text available at http://bioethics.yale.edu/past-research