She was adamant that she wouldn’t want aggressive treatment to keep her alive. She’d been hospitalized many times, and she told me she wouldn’t want to take a hospital bed that would be better used for someone else. So she dutifully completed an advance directive that made her wishes clear. It said that she would not want to be kept alive on a breathing machine, and that she wouldn’t want cardiopulmonary resuscitation if her heart stopped. She also wouldn’t want to be fed through a tube if she was no longer able to eat. What was most important to her, though, was staying at home and avoiding a nursing home.

As a palliative care physician, I always urge my patients to complete advance directives. These are legal documents that tell doctors and family members what treatment they do and don’t want if they’re ever unable to make decisions for themselves. That’s important, because if I don’t know what my patients want, the default is to do everything to keep them alive, which typically results in unnecessary and costly treatment. Indeed, one of the most often-cited arguments for advance directives is the fact that 25 percent of Medicare spending is for people in the last year of life.

When my patient developed a cough and a fever, likely a result of pneumonia, she became too confused to make decisions for herself. Thanks to her advance directive, her family knew that she didn’t want aggressive treatment, and we knew that she wanted to stay home. So we arranged for short-term daily nursing visits and enough support so that, with additional help from her family, she was able to remain at home as she wanted.

… Read More

Image: By SSTEFFEK, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21087977

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike