Now is the Time to Talk About End of Life Care that is Quality of Life Care

[T]he American health care system never taught the public that preventing a natural death often results in a wholly unnatural life.

As an intensive-care unit nurse, I am haunted by memories of patients who were stabilized in intensive care so that their catastrophic injuries or diseases did not kill them, but who were left unable to communicate or do anything but receive medical care....The incapacitated ill are profoundly disenfranchised, and the manipulation of their bodies is extraordinarily invasive and consequential.

It's a moral crisis hiding in plain sight, yet the people involved claim to be mere cogs in the machine. When I asked an ICU attending physician why families aren't given data and clear explanations of probable outcomes rather than best-case scenarios and “only time will tell” conversations, he said, “palliative care people can do that. In the ICU, we don't really have time.” Another physician mentioned the “inertia of the system.”

It falls to the general public — the patients — to take the initiative in reforming the excesses of modern medical care.

You can determine your fate by completing an advance directive. This is a legal document in which you can explain what measures should be undertaken if you are unable to communicate; name a health care proxy who can communicate your wishes to medical providers; and lay out how you envision the end of your life.

Why you should make end-of-life care decisions now