Social Media Ideas for Advance Directives

People urged to make advance healthcare plans

How a misread living will led to a 6-day court fight

Six days. $20,000 in legal fees. One advance directive (living will) applied too soon. A 60-year-old man suffered complications after cardiac catheterization, developing acute kidn...

Essential Estate Planning Before a Health Crisis

Most people think about estate planning in terms of death; they want to make plans for who gets the house, who inherits any savings, and whether the estate will have to go through...

Scarlet Beast launches a free psychiatric advance directive builder for all 50 states, built by a founder who published...

A free, private web tool now helps anyone in the U.S. write a psychiatric advance directive: how they want to be treated in a mental health crisis and who speaks for them. It cover...

Goals of care should be decided long before the ICU

In the midst of a busy Monday clinic, I field calls from the nursing facility in India where my aunt is slowly dying. The young doctors there are traumatized by our family’s refusa...

The Morbid Details: You Decide or It Gets Decided for You

In the spirit of October, which is not only National Estate Planning Awareness Month but also the month of Halloween, it seems appropriate to think about what can feel like a grues...

Incapacity planning is about authority, not family

In a recent KevinMD podcast, palliative physician Kirsten Engel and writer Medha Tripathi described a patient they called Mr. L. He was dying in the hospital. He could not speak fo...

Hospice waits on a court order when no family can speak for you [PODCAST]

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes A man is dying. He cannot speak, and no one in his life can say what he would have wanted. Kirsten Enge...

Two Questions We Must Ask About Dementia Right Now

Dementia presents two urgent challenges: supporting today’s overwhelmed caregivers and expressing our future wishes before we can no longer speak for ourselves.

Preparing for the beginning of the end

The year 2026 has been rather momentous for my family. My youngest daughter turned 21 years of age, my oldest daughter turned 25, my wife and I celebrated 35 years of marriage, my...