You never know when a health crisis can happen. It could be a car accident or a sudden serious illness. In an emergency, you ...

States generally allow a person (principal) to appoint another person (agent) to make health care decisions, receive protected health information, or both on the principal’s behalf. In many states, ...

An advance directive for the state where you live may not be effective in another state. Some states have provisions that respect out-of-state directives as long as they conform to the requirements of ...

Dear Doctor: I recently read about advance directives that deal only with dementia. Is there some benefit to those over the more traditional directives? If so, how do I go about creating one? Dear ...

My sister and I had to make decisions that determined the course of my parents’ final hours. This important end-of-life document could have guided us ...

Typically, the KERA Health Checkup looks at subjects about maintaining your health. But in connection with National Healthcare Decisions Day, we look at advance planning for terminal illness. Sam ...

Jennifer Lagemann is a former family caregiver, as well as a professional caregiver and administrator at home care agencies. She works as a writer and researcher, helping care providers create patient ...

The article by Drs-Blackmer and Ross on ‘Awareness and use of Advance Directives in the Spinal Cord Injured Population’ (Spinal Cord 2002; 40: 581–594) highlights the importance of health-care advance ...

Columns share an author’s personal perspective. Life is a terminal condition; everyone who lives eventually dies. So medicine’s role is not just to treat and possibly cure diseases, but to improve the ...

There are a number of assumptions that the legitimacy of a particular application of an advance directive appears to operate under. First, there is the assumption that the author of the advance ...

It’s a common hope that most people share: that their end-of-life wishes will be respected if something happened and they couldn’t make their own health care decisions. Yet only about a third of ...