Medical Advance Directive: An Emphatic " NO! " to Dementia

Norman Cantor, a lawyer and Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law wrote a thoughtful article about the medical Advance Directive in the Harvard Law School "Bill of Health" blog http://blogs.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2017/04/20/changing-the-paradigm-of-advance-directives/and explaining why he is revising his own medical Advance Directive to instruct his physicians and caretakers to allow him to die if he had developed a dementia "upon reaching a degree of permanent mental dysfunction that I deem to be intolerably demeaning.  For me, this means mental deterioration to a point when I can no longer read and understand written material such as a newspaper or financial records such as a checkbook" Read his entire presentation at the Harvard Law blog link above and then return to present your views on adding profound mental deterioration to the list of physical illnesses which are irreversible and can be highly distressful to the patient and his family's lives and which he does not want to experience or have his family experience further and if he should face a treatable but serious life threatening condition, he should be allowed to die. Hopefully, all of my blog readers have their own medical Advance Directive written to designate  a  surrogate to attend to their wishes for treatment of a potentially fatal illness when it occurs. If not, as your physician moderator of this bioethics blog, I would strongly recommend it be created and available for your ...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Tags: Health Care syndicated Source Type: blogs