This is part 9 in “Becoming A Proactive Patient”
Practical tools to help you navigate doctors, tests, treatments, and costs, so you can avoid pitfalls, make informed choices, and become an active partner in your care.
When you cannot speak for yourself, someone else must.
In emergency departments, operating rooms, and intensive care units, clinicians need an answer fast—often before families have grasped what’s happening. Who decides whether a new medication is started, a breathing tube is placed, or treatment continues?
By the time families discuss wishes, the question is no longer whether to begin, but whether to stop.
This default path carries real weight: pain, side effects, prolonged suffering, mounting costs, and the risk of treatment that overrides what the patient would have wanted or even violates their deeply held values.
Why Most People Don’t Have a Proxy
A health care proxy, sometimes called a durable power of attorney for health care, names the person who can decide when you cannot. It gives one person the authority to say yes or no to what follows: which procedures are performed, which machines are used, and when care continues or stops.
