Advance directives are compatible with good medical practice

Implementing advance directives in office practice.

Patients prepare advance directives in an effort to maintain autonomy during periods of incapacity or at the end of life. Advance directive documents are specific to the state in which the patient lives, but an effective strategy in the family physician's office involves more than filling out a form. Physician barriers to completing an advance directive include lack of time and discomfort with ...

The growing importance of advance medical directives.

Dying with dignity - advance directives.

Dying with dignity – advance directives To the Editor: We may be grateful to Dr Larsen for drawing our attention to the recent launch of Dignity SA.1 Dignity SA aims to support the provision of palliative care plus an option of legalised assisted dying; their website is http://dignitysa.com/. In this aim, they reflect the UK organisation: Dignity in Dying, with its years of experience and their...

Do Advance Directives Direct?

Resolution of long-standing debates about the role and impact of advance directives - living wills and powers of attorney for health care - has been hampered by a dearth of appropriate data, in particular data that compare the process and outcomes of end-of-life decision making on behalf of patients with and without advance directives. Drawing on a large ethnographic study of patients in two in...

Advance directives and medical treatment at the end of life.

To assess the consequences of advance medical directives--which explicitly specify a patient's preferences for one or more specific types of medical treatment in the event of a loss of competence--we analyze the medical care of elderly Medicare beneficiaries who died between 1985 and 1995. We compare the care of patients from states that adopted laws enhancing incentives for compliance with adv...