ABSTRACT
Families have always been faced with making difficult decisions for each other regarding matters of health. Patients who are mentally competent to make treatment decisions on their own behalf do not require advance directives, nor do they require others to decide on their own behalf. Informal advance directives have a long history in medicine. For centuries people have been telling friends, family members, and physicians verbally how they want to be treated. The development of living wills have also raised a number of concerns; for example, early living wills tended to include ambiguous language such as “terminal illness,” “heroic measures,” and “extraordinary treatment,” terms that had not been well defined. The public policy approach in Canada has similar features to that of the United States but is unique in several respects. Canadians watched with interest the deliberation of the United States Supreme Court in the case of Nancy Cruzan.
