Advance Directives are your instructions that you either tell someone (that you legally appointed) or wrote down listing information about what future medical care you want or don't want, in the event that you cannot speak for yourself. These directives are regulated differently by each state and there are two types: a Living Will and a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care or also called a Medical Power of Attorney. Advance directives give you a choice in decisions concerning medical care when you are unconscious or too sick to communicate. To download Advance Directives of different states CLICK HERE.
A Living Will is an advance directive in writing, where a person (who is unable to communicate) requests that a doctor not connect them to life-support equipment, or that they be disconnected from life-support equipment, if that equipment is merely delaying an inescapable death. This Living Will is legal in all 50 states but your state law may decide when it goes into effect, and to which treatments the will may apply. Your right to accept or refuse treatment is protected by constitutional law.
A Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care or Medical Power of Attorney is a document that allows you to appoint someone to make decisions about your medical care when you are unable to make your own decisions. The document may also be referred to as a "health care proxy." The person you appoint may be called your health care agent or proxy, attorney-in-fact or surrogate.
Some other terms are used to describe a person who is in a coma from which they will never recover. This condition may be referred to as the person being "brain dead or in a persistent vegetative state." The person may be on life-support systems but they have no cognitive functions occurring in their brain and they cannot recover. They will in all likelihood die immediately, if removed from life-support machines.
