Excerpt from: New York Times (click for full article)
Dr. Rebecca Sudore, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent several years developing Prepare, and in that time, “the tide in advance care planning has been moving away from forms and toward discussions,” she told me. Her site reflects that shift.
Dr. Sudore and several colleagues have thought a lot about those forms, called advance directives, and they have pinpointed why they don’t work as well as you’d hope. To take one problem, people find it hard to come up with answers to hypothetical situations (“Do you want a feeding tube?”) that might be years away.
And people often choose a health care proxy — someone to make medical decisions for them if they are incapacitated — and then neglect to tell anyone, or even ask that person if she will accept the responsibility.
Advance directives typically focus on end-of-life care, but “most people make a lot of medical decisions about serious diseases and treatments over the course of their lives,” Dr. Sudore pointed out. “They’re not only end-of-life decisions.”
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