Deciding on Life Support

Learn how to complete the most important health directive: the POLST form. The polst form tells the doctors and medical staff what to do if you’re critically ill and can’t make your own decisions. It’s more detailed than an advance directive you get from a lawyer, and it’s free.

First, decide whether you want resuscitation in cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. If your heart stops beating or your lungs stop breathing, "DNR" means that the instructions are to let you die naturally and give medicines for pain or suffering. "Attempt resuscitation" means that you want the doctors to do high voltage electric shocks on your chest, powerful chest compressions to pump your heart through the rib cage, and put a breathing tube down your throat which connects to a life support machine, or ventilator.

What if you’re not dead, but critically ill? If you select full treatment, the doctors will insert a breathing tube and keep you alive on a ventilator, but it could cause some suffering. Choose “selective treatment" if you want the doctors to do whatever it takes to save you, including oxygen, antibiotics, IV fluids, dialysis, surgery, and other lifesaving treatments, but not to resuscitate if you die.

"Comfort focused treatment" means to stop all needles and painful procedures, and to give whatever treatment needed to control pain and suffering, knowing that you will not live long. It’s often provided in the comfort of the home. Learn more at www.healthdirective.org

Created by Gaurav Mathur MD. I'm a palliative care physician; I take care of patients who are extremely ill or even dying. I control pain and suffering with medicines, and I counsel patients on what treatments might help or hurt.

Most people don't talk to their families about death. When they become critically ill, their families feel obligated to choose invasive and painful treatments that cause them to suffer needlessly. Many elderly patients would want to die naturally at home with their families around them. Instead, they end up on a life support machine, with a breathing tube in their throat and medical restraints to stop them pulling it out when they become delirious. If you don't want that to happen to you, make your wishes clear - it only takes a few minutes to fill out the POLST form and it's free.

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