Living Will and Advanced Directives

Dementia Values & Priorities Tool: Designed to help you communicate your wishes regarding future care if you are living with dementia. After answering a series of questions related to the changes commonly seen in the progression of dementia, the tool will provide you with a document that can be added to your existing advance directive and shared with others. https://www.compassionandchoices.org/dementia-values-tool

Advance Directives/Living Wills – Delaware
https://dhss.delaware.gov/Dsaapd/advance.html

Durable Power of Attorney & Living Will – Delaware
https://courts.delaware.gov/help/poa.aspx

Guardianship (may be done without an attorney)
https://courts.delaware.gov/chancery/guardianship/index.aspx
https://courts.delaware.gov/forms/download.aspx?id=70778

Delaware Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (DMOST)
https://dqolc.org/dmost/
https://dqolc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DMOST-Form-and-FAQs-new-form.pdf

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

For many, a ‘natural death’ may be preferable to enduring CPR
In real life, people similarly believe that survival after CPR is over 75%.
In reality, it is only 7.6%

“Nurse refuses to perform CPR…911 dispatcher’s pleas ignored.”

According to family, the woman had wished to “die naturally and without any kind of life-prolonging intervention.”

So why the controversy? It comes down to a widespread misconception of what CPR can, and can’t, do. CPR can sometimes save lives, but it also has a dark side.

Many people learn what they know about CPR from television. In 2015, researchers found that survival after CPR on TV was 70%.

But the true odds are grim…the overall rate of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had barely changed in thirty years. It was 7.6%.

A rare but particularly awful effect of CPR is called CPR-induced consciousness

It’s not just a matter of life or death, if you survive, but quality of life.

Only 20-40% of older patients who survive CPR were able to function independently

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/29/1177914622/a-natural-death-may-be-preferable-for-many-than-enduring-cpr

The Hidden Harms of CPR
The brutal procedure can save lives, but only in particular cases.
Why has it become a default treatment?

It is an open secret in medicine that CPR is both brutal and rarely effective. The procedure begins at death, when someone loses a pulse

It requires a hundred chest compressions per minute…and using a defibrillator to deliver an electric shock to the chest

The force of compressions can shatter ribs…puncture lungs, bruise the heart, cause major blood vessels to rupture

CNMRI: Neurology, Sleep Medicine, MRI

Medical practice of doctors specializing in neurology, sleep medicine and MRI

Living Will and Advanced Directives

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