Are patients in nursing homes more likely to die from suicide? A look at a recent report on the subject in the Annals of Long-Term Care.
Read More
End-of-life pain can be complex and not all such pain is easily or satisfactorily controlled. FEN member Craig Phillips shares his experiences with pain control while working as a volunteer in a hospice.
This is the final post of the series reviewing Professor Thaddeus Pope’s analysis of why clinicians perceive that not following a patient’s preferences about end-of-life care carries little risk for them. Additional legal remedies (causes of action available against clinicians who ignore patient choices), along with administrative penalties, and possible criminal liability for clinicians in some jurisdictions are discussed.
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.
In Part 1, I provided an actual case of unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment (LSMT), listed Professor Pope’s “Twelve Leading Causes of Unwanted Life-Sustaining Treatment,” gave the causes of action that may be available for unwanted LSMT, and briefly discussed Physician’s Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) and other similar documents used in various states. Here, in Part 2, I delve further into Professor Pope’s research on unwanted LSMT.
An important right in managing end-of-life medical treatment is the right to make our own decisions, either directly or through a surrogate, about when to refuse unwanted treatments. No one has done more to call attention to the right to reject unwanted medical treatment than Thaddeus Pope, who tracks litigation against medical providers who treat patients in ways the patients do not want to be treated, in direct violation of their expressed written choices, their verbally-expressed decisions, or the decisions of their medical agents.
What resources and services do home funeral guides and end-of-life (EOL) assistants offer or provide?
Since the 1970s there have been debates about whether “patients” have the right to refuse various forms of life-saving or life-sustaining medical treatment, ranging from blood transfusions to ventilators and feeding tubes. More recently the debate has moved into the area of dementia and which, if any, kinds of treatment may be refused under the terms of a directive written in advance of loss of decision-making capacity. The issue of forced feeding is addressed by several articles in the July/August issue (48:4) of the Hastings Center Report, one of the nation’s preeminent bioethics publications.
A Washington state man, Aaron McQ, described his illness (a rare form of ALS) as “terrifying . . . like waking up every morning in quicksand.” He agreed to discuss his experience with Kaiser News to help provide more understanding about how users feel after qualifying for PAD. Over 3,000 terminally ill residents in the US have used PAD laws since Oregon’s first took effect twenty years ago. This is one man’s experience.
ZDoggMD (Zubin Damania, MD) explains in his engrossing style what it really means to decide that you want to be kept alive by doing everything possible. It may be time to remodel those advance directives.
Visitor Count:
