Living Will

By Gabriel Adams

A living will can save your family from taking critical decisions when you’re in the terminal stage of illness. This is a legal document that allows you to decide in a pre written statement directed to the healthcare professionals the critical steps to be taken in case you can no longer speak for yourself. A living will can protect your family from the vital disputes over some extreme medical cases whether to keep you alive. Having a living will can earn you freedom over your own decisions -whether you want to live or die. Advanced directive or the phrase proxy directive is sometimes used to describe a living will and the power of attorney merged together.

Living will is somewhat the reflection of a desire to die a natural death. If you do not want the emergency life supporting system to keep you alive when there is no reasonable chance of recovery, the living will allow your doctor to remove the emergency life supporting system under certain circumstances so that no one else has to decide on your behalf whether you wanted to be kept alive artificially.

Medical advancements allow a patient to be kept alive by artificial means for an infinite period of time - sometimes as a temporary measure eventually leading towards the restoration of health. However In certain cases it can delay the natural process of dying causing turmoil between the family members who are entitled to take the decisions on the patient’s behalf. At any time the patient retain the right to either continue or terminate such processes under the eyes of the law. Nevertheless when the person has lost his way to communicate, a living will can allow the authority to undertake measures according to the statements left behind in their living will. Even in New York when the patient is incompetent and can no longer be consulted on how his medical treatments should proceed; these health care declarations are recognized and can be consulted for the future of the terminally ill patient.

Only 30% of Americans took the opportunity of having a living will while the rest 60% have no control of how their medical treatment should be proceeded once they are unable to decide for themselves. Sometimes stubborn family members who are not yet ready to let go off the patient prolongs the natural death by keeping him artificially alive for months without any sign of the slightest recovery. Having a living will can let your family respect your decision to what you would have wanted if you had been able to communicate.

Currently all the states of the United States have favorable provision of laws for the patient to decide about their own medical treatment before the advanced or proxy directives are being consulted. This allows the patient to set forth a living will mentioning clearly and concisely about the type and duration of the treatment they want to receive before getting incompetent of communication. The recent case of Terri Schiavo highlighted the fact that how important it is today for everyone to leave a living will.

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