What you need to know about advance directives.

A time to live, a time to die: advance directives and living wills.

A "living will" is a type of health care document known as an "Advance Medical Directive." An advance directive is a generic term for a form or document which expresses your preferences in the event you are physically and mentally unable to make medical care decisions for yourself. That is, an Advance Medical Directive is a method of letting others know your wishes about treatment if you are un...

Medical complications of modern art. What you need to know about body piercing.

Chronic in-center hemodialysis patients' attitudes, knowledge, and behavior towards advance directives.

Forty-three chronic in-center hemodialysis patients were asked about their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior towards advance directives. The survey collected patient demographic data and assessed attitudes, knowledge, and behavior towards advance directives by agreement or disagreement with statements. Sixty-six percent of patients did not know what a health care proxy was, and 42% did not kno...

Assessing Advance Care Planning: Examining Autonomous Selections in an Advance Directive.

We examined the management of completed advance directives including why participants completed a document, what procedures and values they chose, with whom they held end-of-life conversations, and where they stored their document. Participants elected to complete a SurveyMonkey survey that was made available to individuals who wrote an advance directive through TexasLivingWill.org; 491 individ...

Welcome to virosphere

Viruses may seem alien, but they are the most abundant and, arguably, the most important organisms on Earth. They are found just about everywhere, from oceans and forests to the people around you and, of course, in and on you as well. This world of strange, quasi-living things has been dubbed the virosphere, and it is a mysterious one – we know less about viruses than any other life form. But t...