Medical Futility and their Religious Rulings

One of the emerging issues in medical sciences is useless treatments and is one of the topics - in any form - is subject to defining and declaratory law of Islam religion, but in practice, finding its religious rulings is difficult for a variety of reasons. In one hand, in the first stage, consensus on a concept accepted by knowledge and medical ethics is not easily possible and on the other hand, supposing consensus on definition, deduction of its religious ruling is facing significant challenges due to requirements and physical and mental consequences for the patient and his/her relative and also considering source of supplying respective costs - the patient or treasury.

This present analytical descriptive study tries to achieve a predominant opinion after discovering an incidental concept for it from among two theories of illegality of treatment cessation and incumbency of its continuation based on religious reasons.

Findings are illustrative that religious reasons indicate illegality of treatment cessation and necessity of its continuation and if we can consider it as representation of abolition, permit or even incumbency of treatment cessation can be doomed, provided that useless treatment is considered as representation of abolition.