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Withholding Treatment

"Withholding Treatment" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

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Withholding or withdrawal of a particular treatment or treatments, often (but not necessarily) life-prolonging treatment, from a patient or from a research subject as part of a research protocol. The concept is differentiated from REFUSAL TO TREAT, where the emphasis is on the health professional's or health facility's refusal to treat a patient or group of patients when the patient or the patient's representative requests treatment. Withholding of life-prolonging treatment is usually indexed only with EUTHANASIA, PASSIVE, unless the distinction between withholding and withdrawing treatment, or the issue of withholding palliative rather than curative treatment, is discussed.


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This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Withholding Treatment" by people in this website by year, and whether "Withholding Treatment" was a major or minor topic of these publications.
Bar chart showing 8 publications over 4 distinct years, with a maximum of 3 publications in 2021
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.