Michigan's Sensible Living Will

Abstract

AN elderly patient in a nursing home, hopelessly incapacitated by an incurable disease, has a fever that is most likely due to pneumonia or some other serious infection. Should the physician in charge respond with the usual diagnostic or therapeutic measures, or should treatment be limited to the relief of symptoms, thus allowing the infection to take its probably fatal course?In the survey published by Brown and Thompson in this issue of the Journal, a decision was evidently made not to treat actively in about 40 per cent of the cases, and the majority of those patients died. . . .