![]() The patient succumbs in anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. In those places, if you qualify, you can ask a doctor to prescribe a lethal drug, which you can take when you are ready to die.īut the rules for qualifying pose impossible hurdles for people with dementia: you have to be mentally competent and able to take the medication yourself-no one can help you.īy the time someone with Alzheimer’s is six months from the end, he (or she) can meet neither of these requirements.Īnother way a terminally ill, competent person can hasten death is by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED). ![]() Meanwhile, methods of hastening death have become more available to competent people.įor those who are terminally ill and have less than six months to live, medical aid in dying (MAID) is now legal in nine states and DC. The disease slowly runs its course, making victims more and more dependent on the care of others. There is nothing to unplug and no way to avoid prolonged dying. Patients aren’t kept alive or rescued by heroic measures. And almost all have Do Not Resuscitate orders.īut typically, none of those comes into play in the end stage of dementia. People with late-stage dementia have long had a right, through their proxies or previously drawn up health care directives, to forego ventilators or feeding tubes. I think it’s a flawed solution, which can’t meet that challenge. This type of directive, much debated by bioethicists and legal scholars, came into being because of the unique challenge dementia poses for the right to die. He orders his health care proxy-a family member-to prevent anyone from spoon-feeding him or offering him liquids. If he develops Alzheimer’s or another dementia, Robert directs that food and water be withheld from him at a certain stage in his disease. “I don’t want any church, the government, any doctors or hospitals or even my family to contradict what I want for my death,” he says. It is known as SED by AD, short for Stopping Eating and Drinking by Advance Directive. He wants to go out on his own terms-terms he has specified in a mostly untried kind of advance directive, of which he is a fervent proponent. But it’s not death he fears it’s lingering disability, especially cognitive decline. Like many people, Robert dreads the possibility of getting Alzheimer’s, which is a fatal disease. “If I’m not me, I don’t want to be.” That’s the motto of a healthy man in his 80s who was interviewed some years ago by the New York Times. ![]()
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