A word for 'treated-out' or 'therapied-out' - all medical treatment exhausted without effect

Question

I'm looking for a word that describes the following:

A patient who has received all possible medical treatment but all of them have failed to initiate a cure or remission. The patient cannot be (meaningfully) helped according to conventional medicine. The patient's illness does not necessarily have to be a terminal disease.

Hence: The patient is 'treated-out' or 'therapied-out'.

I'm aware that 'treated-out' and 'therapied-out' do not exist as such, and currently I don't intend to use them.

The word or two-worded term I'm looking for could be the counterpart to the German word 'austherapiert'.

NOTE: I'm NOT looking for untreatable patient, terminal-stage patient, palliative care, palliative treatment, or palliative care patient

I am looking for a word or two-worded term that relates to the patient and implies that essentially all conceivable treatment has been tried and applied, unsuccessfully.

---

(UPDATE)

THE MOST APPROPRIATE TERMS FOUND

The following expressions seem to match best for non-terminal diseases:

• all treatment options exhausted
• a treatment-exhausted patient
• 'therapied out' - seems to be an uncommon but more and more frequently used term, according to the search results on Google Books but much less in scientific literature; bear in mind Google's Ngram Viewer has no entries for 'therapied out' (Ngram Viewer version 2012/2013, as available on 22 Nov 2018)

For terminal diseases, these were found (not mentioned above):

• an end-stage patient
• infaust-prognosis patient

Answer 1

From Webster's New World Medical Dictionary, 3rd ed:

refractory Not yielding, or not yielding readily, to treatment.

As the patient had refractory hemispheric epilepsy, a commissurotomy was performed.

Answer 2

treatment resistant

...are treatment resistant in the sense that the majority do not achieve full remission with the first somatic or psychosocial treatment they receive.

There is however, no stable definition of treatment resistant:

The definition of treatment resistance remains controversial in spite of its importance. This review discusses the importance of treatment resistance and the factors affecting its definition in the light of recent advances in knowledge and treatment.

And again:

Little attention has been given to formalizing criteria for evaluating the nature and extent of treatment resistance, even though determining the adequacy and outcome of prior treatment trials is key in clinical decision making about subsequent treatment.

Answer 3

There was a discussion about this in 2005 on proz.com The two most popular translations of austherapiert were:

1. (have/has) exhausted all therapeutical options
2. therapied out

However, the proz.com OP chose "all treatment options exhausted" as her preferred answer. You can view the discussion thread on the link below.

https://www.proz.com/kudoz/german-to-english/medical-general/1181660-austherapiert.html

Answer 4

Your desire for a term that “relates to the patient” (and not to the condition) makes this question difficult, for as pointed out by @Duckisaduckisaduck in this comment,

in western medicine, it is the paradigm to diagnose and describe conditions, not to characterise patients independant of such criteria, ie. the condition is treatment-resistant not the patient.

Personally, I like “Duck’s” answer of “treatment-resistant” (+1) and with the context/particular condition well established, perhaps that answer could apply/transfer to the patient, i.e.,

With regard to his/her [heart/skin/mental/etc] condition, the patient is treatment/therapy-resistant.

Regardless, even if there is a perfect English term relating solely to the patient (as “austherapiert” seems to do in German), I think it would still be necessary to preface its use with a mention of the particular condition at issue. Without such a context-setting reference, it might sound as if the patient is “[all] treated-out” for any and all conditions that s/he might have now or in the future.

With this need (as I see it) to include/restate (even to the point of redundancy) the particular condition at issue in mind (along with my [probably incorrect] assumption that you are not necessarily limiting your search to formal medical/clinical terms), maybe you could consider something like:

With regard to his/her [heart/skin/mental/etc] condition, the patient is [therapeutically] out-of-options.

(cf: this (albeit sans hyphens and the veterinarian’s, not the patient’s) use of the above suggestion in the last paragraph of Dr. O’Brien’s entry from petmd.com)

Answer 5

I’ve worked with infectious disease docs who treat HIV+ patients and say that a patient “failed” a treatment (e.g. “failed Atripla”), as if the patient gave the drug an ‘F’ for the semester or something. It seems odd to say because it likely wasn’t the patient’s fault, so while I might not agree with this phrasing, the phrasing is nonetheless used to indicate that the drug is no longer effective. Another problem is that I've only heard "failed” to refer to the most recent Tx option, and HIV+ patients rarely run out of options, so I can only assume that a doc would say that a patient “failed ARV treatment” if no other options were left.

In referring to aggressive tumors, oncologists I’ve worked with use “recalcitrant” or “refractory” (e.g. “a treatment-refractory tumor”, or "...tumor is recalcitrant to treatment") to indicate the tumor won’t respond or will no longer respond to drug treatment. I think that might be what you’re looking for.

Answer 6

How about

The patient is incurable.

Although most often applied to ailments, it can also be applied to people. See for example Oxford Dictionaries:

1 (of a sick person or a disease) not able to be cured.

Answer 7

Expleitively attenuated

Inconsequentially attritioned

Entropic results

Modalities exasperated

Therapy Tanking

Evaporative resolve

Answer 8

intractable 1

intractable 2

intractable: adjective

1

formal: very difficult or impossible to deal with

2

Stubborn; obstinate (of a person)

Answer 9

You could say the disease is recalcitrant to treatment.

recalcitrant - (adj.)

1. Marked by a stubborn unwillingness to obey authority.
2. Unwilling to cooperate socially.
3. Difficult to deal with or to operate.

This word is used to describe hard-to-treat cancers and antibiotic-resistant infections.