ABSTRACT
For millennia, medical ethics has focused on the doctor-patient relationship. Thus, the SUPPORT trial to improve clinical decision making for seriously ill patients can be viewed as a report about the failure of this dyadic relationship. That is the way I expect most peo ple to read it. And there clearly is a failure of this dyad: physicians who are so unconcerned about patient preferences that they don't even bother to look at them when they're placed in the chart, and patients who do not take advantage of opportunities to discuss their treatment preferences with their physicians.
