The earlier five-part series looking at Thaddeus Pope’s analysis of the risks faced by clinicians who do not follow the advance directives of their patients has been augmented by a case that was recently settled for $1 million. The settlement was reported on March 28, 2019, in the North Coast Journal, Humboldt County, California.
In the previous five posts, I discussed Professor Thaddeus Pope’s legal research on life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT) and end-of-life medical care. Two important points about advance directives (ADs) are not covered in Professor Pope’s treatise because they are not issues that are normally litigated.
In Part 4 of this review of Professor Thaddeus Pope’s analysis of liability for a clinician’s providing unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT), the focus is on on why clinicians perceive that not following a patient’s preferences about end-of-life care carries little risk for them and looking at more recent successful causes of action against clinicians.
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).
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.”
