Treatment for Life-Threatening Illness

To the Editor: Do physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, and members of the general public systematically choose more aggressive treatment for patients they do not know and family members than they would want for themselves? To answer this question, we prepared a questionnaire, which was completed by 90 doctors, 251 nurses and other health professionals, and 193 high-school students and members of the general public. Using a standard clinical scenario tested in other studies,¹–³ we asked respondents to choose a treatment for an 82-year-old man with dementia who was described as having arrived in the emergency department with life-threatening…