[Limiting and refraining from treatment from the legal viewpoint in intensive care medicine]

A physician engaged in intensive care medicine is expected to meet an extremely high degree of decisiveness and responsibility, not only with regard to medical questions but also in view to ethical and juridical problems which might emerge. It is above all the intensive therapy which had contributed to find out the answer of sense and aim of medical activity to be not merely the prolongation of life. On the contrary: the main task of any medical intervention is to pay respect to the humanitarian principle of offering the patient optimal help. What optimal help means in this extreme situation between life and death, prolongation of life or help to terminate life, cannot be decided merely from an objective medical point of view but must be judged, above all, from the patient's very subjective view and his/her individual physical, psychological and social situation.