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.
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
— John Stuart Mill
The United States Constitution and the common law (along with some state constitutions) give us the right to make directives that control the health services we receive if we become mentally incapacitated. The instructions provided by most states in the statutory forms that have been approved since the late 1980s do not limit us. We can write non-statutory directives I call “supplemental directives” when they are attached to and referenced in the statutory directives. We can also write our own health care directives without using statutory forms (an issue to be discussed in a subsequent post).
