Legal Issues in Critical Care Medicine

Abstract

This article introduces some of the legal problems facing physicians practicing critical care medicine. Although there is considerable scholarship dealing with the legal and ethical consequences of withdrawing life-sustaining care from terminally ill or irreversibly comatose patients, little has been written about the legal problems that are the inevitable consequence of the pressure to reduce expenditures for intensive care. Because this is a new area of inquiry, this article draws lessons from analogous situations such as anesthesia care. It is important to stress that legal standard setting may be influenced by concerted action by critical care practitioners; however, if the profession is silent on standards, the law will impose standards that it arrives at in an ad hoc fashion.