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Case 10—Please Stop Torturing Me! (Unless My Wife Is in the Room)

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Abstract

A 55-year-old well-known attorney was diagnosed with B cell lymphoma. Aggressive treatment caused the cancer to go into remission but led to multiple system organ failure. The patient’s second wife insisted on continuing treatment, which included dialysis and other invasive procedures, partly because the oncologists told her that her husband’s cancer had been cured. The intensive care team (and sometimes the patient) saw continuing treatment as futile, but were not able to convince the patient’s wife to agree to any other goals of care.

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Correspondence to Lori A. Roscoe .

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Roscoe, L.A., Schenck, D.P. (2017). Case 10—Please Stop Torturing Me! (Unless My Wife Is in the Room). In: Communication and Bioethics at the End of Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70920-8_10

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