In this, Part 3 of my review of Professor Thaddeus Pope’s paper about the legal issues surrounding unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT), I focus on problems with advance directives (ADs).
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Lamar Hankins shares his notes taken from a lecture by Professor Thaddeus Pope, who spoke on the topic “Avoiding Advanced Dementia with a VSED Directive” for the Hemlock Society of San Diego.
This post lays out a process for making a dementia directive to be used when or if we become unable to make our own views known because of mental incapacity. If you are willing to live with dementia through the end of the disease, this post will not be of use to you.
ZDoggMD (Zubin Damania, MD) explains in his engrossing style what it really means to decide that you want to be kept alive by doing everything possible. It may be time to remodel those advance directives.
No, it is not an obituary for a specific individual. It is an obituary that recognizes and celebrates taking control of one’s end-of-life suffering.
Timothy Boon, RN, is the CEO of Good Shepherd Community Care (GSCC) in Newton, MA. GSCC is an independent, community-based, not-for-profit, non-sectarian, hospice care agency, the first organized in Massachusetts 40 years ago. Recently, he wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss, and recited it on video for ZDoggMD (otherwise known as Dr. Zubin Damania, Founder of Turntable Health, a direct primary care clinic in downtown Las Vegas). The poem is posted here by permission of the author. The video is posted courtesy of ZDoggMD.
One problem with advance directives is that often they are not honored. It is critical that you have a good advocate who demands that you get only the care you want and do not get what is not wanted, not only at end of life but at any time you encounter a medical institution. You will need to choose someone who meets the legal requirements to act as a health care or medical agent, which some states call a proxy, surrogate, or representative. I call this person your “advocate.” State requirements differ greatly, so be sure to use your state’s forms for naming a health care or medical agent, not generic documents like the “5 wishes.”
Nearly everyone hopes for a peaceful death; yet such an end can be elusive. Many of us face both philosophical and practical questions as we do what we can to make our own deaths peaceful.
Some of us may have religious questions. Judaism, like many other religions, is all over the map in its thinking about ways to achieve a peaceful death.
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