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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 traditional 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. 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


• 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 as been tried and applied, unsuccessfully.

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.

intractable 1

intractable 2

intractable: adjective

1

formal: very difficult or impossible to deal with

2

Stubborn; obstinate (of a person)

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

I’m not sure how widely accepted this phrase is, but 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 wasn’t the patient’s fault, but that’s beside the point. “Failed” is often used for just one Tx option though, and those patients rarely run out of options, so I don’t know if a doc would say that a patient “failed ARV treatment”.

In referring to aggressive tumors, oncologists I’ve worked with use “recalcitrant” or “refractory” (e.g. “his cancer is refractory/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.