Schneiderman, Teetzel, and Gilmer offer an amusing but misleading
response to my article on medical futility (CQ Vol 11, No 2).
Although I did make note of the falloff in citations to medical
futility in Medline and Bioethicsline after 1995, my analysis focused
on the precipitous rise in professional publications on the concept in
the period from 1988 to 1995—a trend confirmed by the
authors' own search results. I certainly did not argue, either
explicitly or implicitly, that the discussion of medical futility was
over. I made limited use of this citation survey—to raise a
question about what sparked so much professional debate after 1988.
This seems to me an entirely appropriate methodology.