An Advance Medical Directive (AMD) is a legal document that you sign in advance to inform the doctor treating you (in the event you become terminally ill and unconscious) that you do not want any extraordinary life-sustaining treatment to be used to prolong your life. Making an AMD is a voluntary decision. It is entirely up to you whether you wish to make one. In fact, it is a criminal offence for any person to force you to make one against your will. New advances in medical knowledge and technology create new choices for both patients and health care providers. Some of these choices raise new ethical and legal issues. In this essay, I will discuss choices one can choose, as well as the issues raised.
The AMD applies mostly for people who are critically ill, usually in the terminal stage. There are 2 choices one can make: using modern technology to prolong one's life so that one can see his/her kin for as long as he can, compromising on comfort, or removing any life-sustaining treatment so that one can die naturally and not suffer as much.
One issue regarding AMD is that modern medical technology can technically prolong life in the final stages of a terminal illness. However, it cannot stop the dying process. In such situations, further medical intervention would be medically ineffective, and a decision has to be made whether to withdraw such futile medical intervention. Some terminally ill persons who are unable to express their wishes at that time, may want to be spared further suffering and be allowed to die naturally, in peace and with dignity.
An ethical issue raised would be that AMD is like euthanasia. It allows one the freedom of choice to die, hence drawing a link to suicide. Indeed, AMD does make one pass on faster if one had a terminal disease, but it is far different from euthanasia, and even more different from suicide. Suicide involves many different forms of violent deaths, be it jumping off a building, drinking toxic substances, slitting one's neck et cetera. However, euthanasia involves remedying suffering by injecting a lethal dose of anaesthesia of some sort to permanently put the body to sleep in a non-violent way. Euthanasia is basically a more unhealthy way of remedying pain and suffering, whereas AMD is a more natural way of doing so. AMD involves removing all life-support and all life-sustaining treatment so that one can pass away as though there were no treatment at all. I do not believe that this is unethical, as choosing not to accept treatment can have many reasons. One being that one does not want to suffer anymore, and two being that one does not want to waste any more money prolonging his life so that the money can be used by his family elsewhere.
Overall, I believe that AMD is nothing near euthanasia, as euthanasia is an assisted suicide, where as AMD removes all assistance so that one can pass on naturally and more peacefully, rather than endure the pains of being awake, being alive.
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