[Limits of intensive care medicine. Medical and legal aspects]

Modern intensive care can extend life. However, it may also extend the dying period. Because of this fact, doctors have been publicly accused of extending dying beyond human dignity, rather than accepting the end of life. In an attempt to regulate the abandonment, reduction or interruption of intensive care, the "Bundesärztekammer" has released new guidelines in 1993: measures which extend life - medicinal or apparative - may be interrupted if the delay of the patient's death results in an unreasonable extension of his suffering, and his terminal illness can not be influenced. Under these circumstances, a possible shortening of life may be accepted. A prescription of pain- and anxiety relieving drugs is both medically and legally accepted, even if it results in a shortening of life for a limited time. Today, an insufficient analgesia of seriously ill patients should be considered a treatment error.