Advance directives ensure that your wishes will be respected for your end of life.
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IStock / City Presse
Limiting or stopping treatment for a loved one considered medically at the end of their life is a cruel choice for any family.
In order to facilitate decision-making, it is possible to express your wishes in advance thanks to advance directives.
Impose your will
It was in 2005 that the Leonetti law introduced this opportunity.
Except that at the time, this document, valid for three years, had only advisory value for the doctor.
To go further, the legislator has decided to give real legal significance to advance directives, through the law of February 2, 2016. Therefore, any doctor confronted with a patient who is unable to make his wishes known because of a serious and incurable disease, in advanced or terminal phase, must seek to know if he has established such a document.
If this is the case, these instructions are binding on the medical profession for any decision of investigation, intervention or treatment.
Only two exceptions allow them not to be applied: in a life-threatening emergency for the time necessary for a complete assessment of the situation, for example when someone has to be resuscitated following a sudden health accident;
but also when a collegial procedure concludes that these directives appear "manifestly inappropriate or not in conformity with the medical situation".
In the absence of instructions, it is the testimonies of a trusted person and more generally of relatives, which make it possible to decide on the procedure to be followed.
Clarity is essential
Any adult can write advance directives, without any specific formality being required.
A free paper specifying your identity, date and signature is sufficient.
To guide you, the Ministry of Health offers two models to download from the Service-public.fr site, depending on whether you are in good health or suffering from a serious illness.
This involves deciding on essential questions such as whether or not to accept being kept alive despite a loss of consciousness and without the possibility of communicating with your loved ones.
Likewise, you can indicate whether you want certain medical procedures (cardiac resuscitation, putting on a ventilator, surgery, etc.) to be carried out for the sole purpose of keeping you artificially alive.
Finally, if you stop taking treatment, do you want to be relieved of your suffering even if it leads to your death?
Do not fall into oblivion
If such decisions are most often a personal and intimate conviction, it is still important to seek advice from your doctor and discuss it with your loved ones.
Especially since the more people will be informed, the more chances you will have that your wishes will not be forgotten.
At a minimum
, entrust your advance directives to someone you trust.
Better yet, contact your doctor to keep them in your personal file.
If your general practitioner is equipped, the ideal is even to have your wishes recorded in your shared medical file, which can be consulted online, so that they are directly accessible to all health professionals.
Since 2016, advance directives have unlimited legal value.
Consider changing their content if your position has changed over the years.
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