Wishes To Die For: Expanding Upon Doing Less in Advance Care Directives - Softcover
Many believe that life is worth sustaining to uphold a person’s dignity. Others prefer peaceful transitions from life that are free of worry, indignation, and condemnation. Dying consciously and with dignity is telltale of an honorable life, yet many struggle with this concept as it relates to physician-assisted suicide. Dying with dignity is a personal perception, prospective choice, and conscious undertaking.
As an emergency medicine physician, Kevin Haselhorst routinely confronts the controversies and atrocities that patients experience near the end of life. The emotional turmoil inherent to emergency departments rarely provides dignity to patients. Nonetheless, this often remains the final go-to plan for averting death and dying.
In Wishes to Die For, Dr. Haselhorst melds his practice of yoga with the practice of medicine and provides a heart-centered alternative to end-of-life torment. Dignity through personal empowerment is derived from declaring and documenting heartfelt wishes with the sole purpose of lessening defense mechanisms to gain lasting fulfillment.
When people align their wishes with personal belief systems rather than the healthcare establishment, a new paradigm for end-of-life care is created. Evoking compassion through mutual empowerment affords the shared understanding that dignity is a spiritual word in the context of advance care planning.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Author:
AdvanceCare Directives address ending life.
Wishes To Die For envisions achieving fulfillment.
"In Wishes To Die For, Dr. Kevin Haselhorst brings his deep experience as an ER physician to the task of helping us, and those we love, die with forethought, dignity, and peacefulness." ~ Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters
"It's well worth taking this journey with the author to help us clarify our own beliefs." ~ Carol Bradley Bursack, Excerpt from Foreword, author and columnist, Minding Our Elders
"What are your wishes?" Dr. Kevin Haselhorst has posed this question to his patients for years while practicing emergency medicine. Patients inevitably say, "You tell me. You're the doctor." Dr. H. has taken this task to heart while writing Wishes To Die For. Empathy, being an inside journey, is the art of medicine that builds mutual respect between physicians, patients and family members.
While Advance Care Directives are the voice for those who can no longer speak, Dr. H offers impassioned words about the value of ACD's as a spiritual undertaking and declaration. Advance care planning as preventative medicine emboldens readers to eventually graduate from Alpha care to Omega care through traditional guidelines for higher education.
Wishes To Die For empowers patients and caregivers a better understanding of how to:
Foreword
By Carol Bradley Bursack, author and columnist, Minding Our Elders
"Code Blue!" A voice cries out in the Emergency Department. "Is there a doctor who can 'tube' a patient in Cardiac Cath Lab?"
With these first lines of Wishes To Die For: A Caregiver's Guide to Advance Care Directives, Dr. Kevin J. Haselhorst prepares readers for a journey that will help them clarify their personal views about what constitutes life.
What decisions do you want made for you as you approach your final days, hours or minutes, or even earlier if an incapacitating event alters your ability to make your own medical decisions even temporarily? Does your spouse know what you'd want? Do your other family members? If you have not made you're your wishes clear, in written form, often what the medical team may be required to do could conflict with what you or your family wants done - or not done.Why? Because without written guidance, once you or your loved one are in the care of medical personnel their medical oath and directive will prevail.
Dr. Haselhorst knows about this subject from the perspective of a compassionate physician. In "Wishes" he describes his own internal battle to balance his training as a doctor who'cures at all costs' with his patients' desires. Through his book, Haselhorst encourages us, as potential patients, to examine our right to decide how, and under what circumstances, we will be allowed to die a natural death.
Haselhorst builds a solid case that a document expressing our end-of-life desires should be fluid, changing with our age, our health and our own fluctuating point of view. The treatment that we would choose when we are 35 years old may be vastly different from the treatment we'd choose at age 80.
He writes, "I cannot remember the last time that I wished for a feeding tube, dialysis or ventilator." Haselhorst is not denigrating life-saving treatments. He is simply stressing that we must continually update our health directive so that it reflects our current wishes.
Haselhorst challenges us to examine what we would want as our lives evolve. Treatments that increase our chances for survival may be a correct choice under some circumstances. But there often comes a time in our lives where less medical intervention is in our best interest. Unless our current wishes are made known to our health providers and family, we may not be able to choose the manner in which our life comes to a close.
While reading the book I underlined,highlighted, and placed colored tabs on pages so that I could remember the most vital information and pass it along. Before long, I realizedHaselhorst's words must be read in the context of the book in order to reveal their full meaning.
Haselhorst believes strongly that people have a right to change their minds about end-of-life care right up to their last breath. To address this belief, he has designed a wristband similar to the ubiquitous Livestrong Foundation wristband. Haselhort's wrist band is bright yellow and embossed with the words 'Alpha Care' on one side meaning that the patient wishes doctors to keep trying all possible treatments to keep him or her alive. The reverse side is a subdued blue and embossed with the words 'Omega Care' indicating the patient'swish to be allowed a natural death. With a twist of the wrist band a patient can communicate his or her current feelings on whether or not to use life extending treatments.
Haselhorst sums up his message with the words, "Death with dignity is only realized through the empowerment attained from engagement of the patientThis thought-provoking book offers you a method of engagement and a map to that empowerment. I strongly recommend that you take this opportunity to learn more about exerting as much control as possible over your own final experience.
From the Inside Flap:
By Carol Bradley Bursack, author and columnist, Minding Our Elders
"Code Blue!" A voice cries out in the Emergency Department. "Is there a doctor who can 'tube' a patient in Cardiac Cath Lab?"
With these first lines of Wishes To Die For: A Caregiver's Guide to Advance Care Directives, Dr. Kevin J. Haselhorst prepares readers for a journey that will help them clarify their personal views about what constitutes life.
What decisions do you want made for you as you approach your final days, hours or minutes, or even earlier if an incapacitating event alters your ability to make your own medical decisions even temporarily? Does your spouse know what you'd want? Do your other family members? If you have not made you're your wishes clear, in written form, often what the medical team may be required to do could conflict with what you or your family wants done - or not done.Why? Because without written guidance, once you or your loved one are in the care of medical personnel their medical oath and directive will prevail.
Dr. Haselhorst knows about this subject from the perspective of a compassionate physician. In "Wishes" he describes his own internal battle to balance his training as a doctor who'cures at all costs' with his patients' desires. Through his book, Haselhorst encourages us, as potential patients, to examine our right to decide how, and under what circumstances, we will be allowed to die a natural death.
Haselhorst builds a solid case that a document expressing our end-of-life desires should be fluid, changing with our age, our health and our own fluctuating point of view. The treatment that we would choose when we are 35 years old may be vastly different from the treatment we'd choose at age 80.
He writes, "I cannot remember the last time that I wished for a feeding tube, dialysis or ventilator." Haselhorst is not denigrating life-saving treatments. He is simply stressing that we must continually update our health directive so that it reflects our current wishes.
Haselhorst challenges us to examine what we would want as our lives evolve. Treatments that increase our chances for survival may be a correct choice under some circumstances. But there often comes a time in our lives where less medical intervention is in our best interest. Unless our current wishes are made known to our health providers and family, we may not be able to choose the manner in which our life comes to a close.
While reading the book I underlined,highlighted, and placed colored tabs on pages so that I could remember the most vital information and pass it along. Before long, I realizedHaselhorst's words must be read in the context of the book in order to reveal their full meaning.
Haselhorst believes strongly that people have a right to change their minds about end-of-life care right up to their last breath. To address this belief, he has designed a wristband similar to the ubiquitous Livestrong Foundation wristband. Haselhort's wrist band is bright yellow and embossed with the words 'Alpha Care' on one side meaning that the patient wishes doctors to keep trying all possible treatments to keep him or her alive. The reverse side is a subdued blue and embossed with the words 'Omega Care' indicating the patient'swish to be allowed a natural death. With a twist of the wrist band a patient can communicate his or her current feelings on whether or not to use life extending treatments.
Haselhorst sums up his message with the words, "Death with dignity is only realized through the empowerment attained from engagement of the patientThis thought-provoking book offers you a method of engagement and a map to that empowerment. I strongly recommend that you take this opportunity to learn more about exerting as much control as possible over your own final experience.
AdvanceCare Directives address ending life.
Wishes To Die For envisions achieving fulfillment.
"In Wishes To Die For, Dr. Kevin Haselhorst brings his deep experience as an ER physician to the task of helping us, and those we love, die with forethought, dignity, and peacefulness." ~ Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters
"It's well worth taking this journey with the author to help us clarify our own beliefs." ~ Carol Bradley Bursack, Excerpt from Foreword, author and columnist, Minding Our Elders
"What are your wishes?" Dr. Kevin Haselhorst has posed this question to his patients for years while practicing emergency medicine. Patients inevitably say, "You tell me. You're the doctor." Dr. H. has taken this task to heart while writing Wishes To Die For. Empathy, being an inside journey, is the art of medicine that builds mutual respect between physicians, patients and family members.
While Advance Care Directives are the voice for those who can no longer speak, Dr. H offers impassioned words about the value of ACD's as a spiritual undertaking and declaration. Advance care planning as preventative medicine emboldens readers to eventually graduate from Alpha care to Omega care through traditional guidelines for higher education.
Wishes To Die For empowers patients and caregivers a better understanding of how to:
- Establish an individual and identifiable meaning and goal for dignity.
- Preregister by completing an ACD during the prime of life.
- Visualize priorities and values being balanced with work and rest.
- Experience life's trials and tribulations as the evolution of virtue.
- Create a definitive finish line and realize lifetime achievement.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherKevin J. Haselhorst PC
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 0991571401
- ISBN 13 9780991571406
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages238
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Wishes To Die For: Expanding Upon Doing Less in Advance Care Directives
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Kevin J. Haselhorst PC
(2015)
ISBN 10: 0991571401
ISBN 13: 9780991571406
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Wishes To Die For: Expanding Upon Doing Less in Advance Care Directives
Published by
Kevin J. Haselhorst PC
(2015)
ISBN 10: 0991571401
ISBN 13: 9780991571406
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Softcover
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