Futile medical care is the continued provision of medical care or treatment to a patient when there is no reasonable hope of a cure or benefit. Some proponents of evidence-based medicine suggest discontinuing the use of any treatment that has not been shown to provide a measurable benefit. Futile care discontinuation is distinct from euthanasia because euthanasia involves active intervention to end life, while withholding futile medical care does not encourage or hasten the natural onset of death. Definition In the broadest sense, futile care is care that does not benefit the patient as a whole, including physical, spiritual, or other benefits. This may be interpreted differently in various legal, ethical, or religious contexts. Clinicians and health care providers may need to rely on a more narrow definition of futile care in order to make decisions about a patient's health care, and this definition often centers around an assessment of the likelihood that a patient could physically recover as a result of treatment, or the likelihood of such treatment to relieve a patient's suffering. Examples of futile care may be a surgeon operating on a terminal cancer patient even when the surgery will not alleviate suffering; or doctors keeping a brain-dead person on life-support machines for reasons other than to procure their organs for donation. It is a sensitive area that often causes conflicts among medical practitioners and patients or kin. Many controversies surrounding the concept of futile care center around how futility is assessed differently in specific situations rather than on arguments in favor of providing futile care per se. It is difficult to determine when a particular course of action may fall under the definition of futile medical care, because of the difficulty in defining the point at which there is no further benefit to intervention in each case. For instance, a cancer patient may be willing to undergo yet more chemotherapy with a very expensive medication for the benefit of a few weeks of life, while medical staff, insurance company staff, and close relatives may believe this is a futile course of care. A 2010 survey of more than 10,000 physicians in the United States found respondents divided on the issue of recommending or giving "life-sustaining therapy when [they] judged that it was futile", with 23.6% saying they would do so, 37% saying they would not, and 39.4% selecting "It depends". Arguments against providing futile medical care