Selecting your treatment choices

If you get very sick or hurt and can’t make decisions about your care, your doctors and the person you picked to help will need to know what you want. That’s why it’s good to think about your choices now.

When you have a serious illness or injury, doctors might use medical procedures, machines, or medications to help keep your vital organs working. These are called life-sustaining treatments.

Understanding life-sustaining treatments

These are treatments that help keep you alive when your body can’t do it on its own. They might help you live longer, but they can also affect your comfort or quality of life. Some people want all treatments. Others want care that helps with pain.

Some examples include:

Feeding tubes to give you food and water
Intravenous (IV) blood transfusions
Dialysis to clean your blood if your kidneys stop working
Breathing machines to help you breathe
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) to try to restart your heart if it stops. For more information, download the CPR fact sheet.

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How your values and beliefs affect your treatment choices

In the Advance Health Care Directive, you can specify under what circumstances you would want to stop, start or limit life-sustaining treatments, thinking about what an acceptable outcome would be for you.

It’s important to know what matters most to you so you can make health care decisions ahead of time. This also helps you share your wishes with your health care agent and care team. Thinking through what is important to you, what living well means to you, and how your culture and belief system influence your health care decisions will help you develop your life care plan.

It’s a good idea to talk about your values with your health care agent, family, and friends. Knowing what matters to you helps your doctors make the best choices for your care. Take time to think about these areas and how they may shape your choices about medical care:

Personal values: What matters most to you in life?
Cultural values: Are there traditions that could affect your medical choices?
Religious values: Do your beliefs affect the kind of care you want?