Advance Directives and Dementia

Abstract

A competent person can avoid the onset of dementia by refusing life-sustaining medical care and by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, bringing life to an end well before any health crisis. A competent person can also try to limit the duration of dementia by drafting an advance directive that sets bounds on the life-sustaining care, including artificial nutrition and hydration, that medical caregivers can provide when the person no longer has the capacity to make her own medical decisions. But between these two strategies there can lie a significant gap. A person could live with moderate to severe dementia for a considerable time, no longer able to voluntarily stop eating and drinking yet also not yet requiring the life-sustaining care forbidden by advance directive. This gap has been much discussed in recent years in the Hastings Center Report. Several years ago (in the May-June 2014 issue), Paul Menzel and M. Colette Chandler-Cramer argued for what they described as a moderate correction to the dominant view that food and water should always be offered to a patient with dementia if the patient expresses a desire to eat and drink. The problem is taken up again by the legal scholar Norman L. Cantor in this issue (July-August 2018), and Cantor, too, tries to find a moderate alternative.