More and more Americans say they want a “good” death, which usually means dying peacefully at home, surrounded by loved ones. Documents called advance directives can help them achieve that goal by ...

Typically, the KERA Health Checkup looks at subjects about maintaining your health. But in connection with National Healthcare Decisions Day, we look at advance planning for terminal illness. Sam ...

No one likes to think about worst-case scenarios, particularly when it comes to their future health problems, and what could happen in the event they are unable to make their own health care decisions ...

Columns share an author’s personal perspective. Life is a terminal condition; everyone who lives eventually dies. So medicine’s role is not just to treat and possibly cure diseases, but to improve the ...

Medical emergencies and unexpected health crises can occur at any age. Advance care planning encourages people to consider potential future scenarios and plan accordingly, even if they’re young and ...

I had hoped that by now most adults in this country would have completed an advance directive for medical care and assigned someone they trusted to represent their wishes if and when they are unable ...

Terri Schiavo's family probably never imagined the decisions they would have to make regarding her care. But the court battle surrounding this 41-year-old woman, who was in a vegetative state since a ...

Advance directives enable individuals to exercise control over their futures and ensure that the care they receive at the end of their lives is pursuant to their wishes. Yet, the majority of ...

It’s a common hope that most people share: that their end-of-life wishes will be respected if something happened and they couldn’t make their own health care decisions. Yet only about a third of ...

It is never too early to discuss care preferences for patients with Alzheimer disease or other dementias. Alzheimer disease is a life-limiting disease with a median survival time from diagnosis of 4.2 ...

No topic is a less likely conversation-starter than our eventual deaths. Still, there is a lot to talk about. When polled, about 90 percent of people presented with end-of-life scenarios prefer the ...

Five minutes. That is all I had to make my case: to convince this 80-year-old man to fill out an advanced care directive. John, as I’ll call him, had served in the military for over thirty years, ...