Term Paper on "Mandating All Adults Sign and Do Not Resuscitate"

Term Paper 5 pages (2037 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

adults sign a Do Not Resuscitate or to Resuscitate

'Do-Not-Resuscitate' - DNR Order from an adult patient directs the medical staff not to attempt to restore the patient if his breathing or heartbeat has blocked. This means that doctors, nurses and other health care practitioners will not start emergency procedures like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, external chest compression, electric shock, and insertion of a tube to open your airway, injection of medication into your heart or open chest. Additionally, the Health Care Proxy Law permits an adult patient to employ someone to make decisions about DNR and other treatments if the patient is not capable of doing the same. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation - CPR refers to the medical procedures employed to revive a patient's heart and breathing when the patient experiences heart failure. CPR may include minor efforts such as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and external chest compression. Sophisticated CPR may include electric shocks, inserting of a tube to open the patient's airway, injecting medication into the heart and in complex difficult cases, open chest heart massage. A do-not-resuscitate - DNR order tells medical professionals not to carry out CPR. DNR orders could be written for patients who is in a hospital or nursing home, or for patients who are at home. Hospital DNR orders inform the medical staff not to resuscitate the patient if cardiac arrest takes place. If the patient is at a nursing home or at his/her home, a DNR order informs the staff and emergency medical personnel not to conduct urgent resuscitation and not to transfer the patient to a hospital for performing CPR. Successful CPR reinstates heartbeat and breathing and permits a patient to recommence his/her earlier lifestyle. The success levels of CPR are based on the patient's general medical condition. Age only does not decide whether CPR will be a success, even though illnesses and weaknesses that accompany age often make CPR less successful. When patients are gravely ill or fatally ill, CPR may not function or may only partly work; leaving the patient in a state of brain-damaged or in a worse medical condition than before the heart had stopped. In such cases, certain patients like to be treated without aggressive activities at resuscitation. (Patient Bill of Rights) it is thus mandatory for all adults to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order.

The following illustrations show the significance of signing DNR orders when a person is in healthy condition. A wheelchair-bound young man, Joe Ehman, was forced by hospital staff to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order while just getting up from anesthesia. To prevent the compulsion, he had to gather the strength to shout, "I'm 30 years old. I don't want to die!" In 1993, Maria Matzik, a woman who prolongs to live with the aid of a ventilator, battled against nurses who required her to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. When she rejected, they told her that because she is on a ventilator, they would not perform any help if she faced a cardiac arrest. Today she considers it lucky to have withstood that hospital stay. (Dealers of Death: ww.catholicexchange.com)

Yet another case is that of Terri. Your will be saddened if you hear the story of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. This woman fell down in her Florida home some thirteen years ago and suffered critical brain injury. A medical misconduct case granted $750,000 for her treatment ten years ago. But her husband has since then not allowed any efforts for her treatment. For years, Terri has been suffering while her husband is looking for court sanction to kill her. Actually, he's used up over half her treatment money by giving it to attorneys in an effort to starve and dehydrate Terri by removing her feeding tube. Her parents' daring willpower to struggle against Mr. Schiavo has helped Terri withstand two such attempts. If Terri had written a living will, the family could have saved its ten years. A woman would have been set free from her troubles, if she disliked living a life like that. All of us have the right to take our medical decisions being known in lawfully binding procedures and we need to all go out to our doctors and attorneys and make them know our wishes. It can prevent many problems. But there is a filthy secret behind these calming words to find that your doctor or attorney might not be impartial in finding out your desires when you visit them. They'll be relocating you towards determining when you need to be killed in place of if you would be killed. (Dealers of Death: (www.envoymagazine.com)

The improvements in modern medicine make us to have a longer and healthier life, and huge developments have been made in overcoming and avoiding diseases. We are thankful for the life-saving treatments now accessible to many people. We also are aware of the challenges, which come with such developments. We are called upon to make judicious decisions about the methods that are available to support life at times of severe illness or looming death. We are required to make such choices either for ourselves or for beloved ones. These are the most difficult and tricky choices of our lives. God's present of human life is the base for all His other gifts. The most essential right of each person is the right to protect his or her life. As God gave this life to us, we do not have the right to take our life either by euthanasia or willful suicide. We must take rational steps to get back our health during sickness. All through our lives we must reflect both on the self-respect as well as the weakness of human life. We should prayerfully develop the goodness of care and reflect on the deep truths of our faith regarding the value of human life and our calling to eternal life. Obviously, we are not fully free to do whatever we wish when we make choices about the care of our own life and health. We are called upon wisely to protect and defend our lives for the service of God and neighbor. When professional medical care is required, we must agree to the practical use of apt services so that we do not ignore our own comfort. (Care of the Sick and Dying)

Ahead of these normal efforts, we have the freedom to use or to reject the more advanced techniques of modern medicine, which may involve extreme difficulty or risk, provided that their use does not stop us from meeting other needs in life, such as spiritual and familial requirements. It is ethically tolerable to stop such treatments when they are no longer helpful. 'Do Not Resuscitate' directives - DNR are an ever more common feature of advance health care directives. The choice of whether or not to resuscitate should be on the basis of the patient's genuine medical condition. Although a DNR may be justified at times, it often can be unsuitable for persons to specify in advance that they must not be resuscitated under any conditions.

DNR instruction centers on answers to these important questions: Is resuscitation useless?; Is resuscitation excessively troublesome to the patient? Advance directives are legal credentials through which persons lead the course of their own medical treatment even after they can no longer be in a position to make choices or notify others of their wishes. For example, an advance directive can be set by which the patient who designates someone else to make health care choices in the occasion that the patient can no longer make such choices individually. A living will is another advance directive that facilitates adults to state in writing their wish to reject certain life-sustaining methods when they can no longer make their own choices as their death is looming from terminal illness, or as they are in a continuous vegetative state. (Care of the Sick and Dying)

The law permits a doctor to make a choice of the patient's mental ability at the time a DNR order is written. The concerned physician must make a decision, to a practical degree of medical certainty that an adult patient is short of decision-making capacity, before a DNR order may be written. The lack of capability to take decisions must be in writing, and must include the doctor's opinion regarding the cause and nature of the patient's incapability as well as the extent and probable duration. The lack of ability to take decisions must be included in the patient's medical chart. (Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession)

In short, the best decision-maker is the patient. Preferably, people will consider end-of-life care while they are still vigilant and conscious, in a setting unimpeded by finances, family pressures, pain, or time. Many physicians launch the issue as a regular part of health maintenance, when people are feeling well and have years to decide what they would wish for themselves. Advance directives are means for an adult to officially tell his doctors what kind of… READ MORE

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