Talk:Advance health care directive
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I took the section about Terri Schiavo's case causing an increased interest in living wills and placed it here in this article. I believe that it is valid to mention that in this article, that it caused more people to look at living wills.. Of course, please feel free to change or update the information. But I would at the same time respectfully request that wholesale deletions not be done because you believe that it doesn't belong here. Thank you.
JesseG 03:02, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)
You might want to add the information that Living Wills address a TERMINAL condition (not Terri's condition which was profoundly disabled). There has been an awful lot of talk about living wills; If she had executed a living will, however, there would have been a need to find her condition "terminal." Lots of BAD information out there regarding living wills. A living will should be differentiated from a durable power of attorney for health care, which gives the power to another person, which a living will does not. An advance care directive is effectively the set in which living wills and durable powers of attorney for health care are subsets. An additional advance directive is a Do Not Resuscitate, which is often regulated by state form. In brief, the living will was popularized many years ago before so many medical advances were made. Its langauge is brief and you might want to link to it. It states wishes. The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care is a creature of State Statute. The DNR is signed by the patient and will result in a DNR order.
- I agree with this person - a living will is not the same thing as a durable power of attorney for healthcare. The living will governs solely end-of-life decisions, something which the attorney-in-fact of a durable power of attorney cannot do. Would someone like to make this distinction in the article itself, please? --TheTriumvir 16:04, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
It seems that people have different understandings of what a "Living Will" is. An Advanced Health Directive (AHD), seen by many as the same as a Living Will, should canvass many situations including persistent vegetative state, and is not purely for a terminal situation. AHD's usually also allow the person completing to appoint an attorney for personal/health matters.
Minor edit: Balancing documentation added. Now, don't everone start getting hysterical, like happens in all these edit wars. When there is not much "discussion," you gotta Be bold sometimes, and remember that this is a balancing addition, positive, it seems. Clarify, tweak, or add material to "balance the force," but don't go deleting willy-nilly without either consensus or very good reason. --GordonWattsDotCom_In_Florida 08:29, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
