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Legal, Medical, And Ethical Issues In Minnesota End-Of-Life Care: An Introduction To The Symposium, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

As America grays, and medicine’s ability to treat the sickest of patients expands, the legal, medical, and ethical issues in end-of-life care become more numerous, pressing, and intertwined. Because Minnesota’s citizens, clinicians, and courts are not far from these concerns, the Hamline University Health Law Institute and the Hamline Law Review hosted an interdisciplinary Symposium entitled "Legal, Medical, and Ethical Issues in Minnesota End-of-Life Care."

On November 9, 2012, we welcomed more than 200 participants to the newly opened Carol Young Anderson and Dennis L. Anderson Center on Hamline University’s Saint Paul campus. These participants included: attorneys, physicians, nurses, social …

Dispute Resolution Mechanisms For Intractable Medical Futility Disputes, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Medical futility disputes occur frequently in healthcare facilities across the United States. In this Article, I provide an overview of dispute resolution mechanisms through which healthcare providers can resolve these disputes. In Section I, identify three distinctive features of medical futility disputes. First, they usually concern life-sustaining medical treatment for patients in a hospital’s intensive care unit. Second, these patients typically lack decision making capacity. So, a surrogate must make treatment decisions on the patient’s behalf. Third, this surrogate and the patient’s physician disagree over the treatment plan. The surrogate wants to continue life-sustaining treatment. But the physician thinks that …