"Advance Care Planning: What No One Wants to Think About But Everyone Should Do"

Advance care planning is a process that addresses the possibility that at some point in your life, due to illness or injury, you will lose the ability to make your own decisions regarding your care. Advance care planning provides a "road map" to those who would have to step up to make decisions on your behalf if -- and only if -- you were unable to make your own. (It is important to note that as long as you are alert and cognitively intact enough to participate in decision-making, your plan would not be activated.) The most important elements of advance care planning involve just two chief decisions that everybody -- even healthy people -- should make: Whom do you trust most to make health care decisions on your behalf if you were unable to speak for yourself, and; would you or would you not want efforts made to prolong your life if your brain were permanently injured, with no expectation of meaningful recovery?

-Diane Meier, MD, Professor, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Medicine, Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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