Exam 3 law Questions With Complete Solutions

civil competency - ANSWER-legal context in which one's mental ability to complete a specific task is questioned -. A competent individual is expected to be able to (1) understand basic information that is relevant to making a decision; (2) apply that information to a specific situation in order to anticipate the consequences of various choices; (3) use logical—or rational—thinking to evaluate the pros and cons of various strategies and decisions; and (4) communicate a personal decision or choice about the matter under consideration. - Planning about future medical treatments is formalized through what are known as advance medical directives, in which patients indicate what kinds of treatment they want should they later become incapacitated and incompetent to make treatment decisions. One of the most important of these advance directives is the "living will," in which a patient essentially asserts that he or she prefers to die rather than to be kept alive on a ventilator or feeding tubes. -The ethical and practical issues involved in determining patients' competence to issue advance medical directives are substantial, but the trend revealed in Supreme Court decisions such as Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (1990), is to recognize that patients have great autonomy in accepting or rejecting a variety of treatments and health care provisions. advance medical directive preferences - ANSWER-documentation indicating future treatments one will accept should one be incapacitated -- Investigators surveyed 405 outpatients of 30 primary care physicians and 102 members of the general public on the topic of advance directives, which were preferred by 93% of the outpatients and 89% of the general public. When people were asked to imagine themselves incompetent and with a poor prognosis, they decided against life-sustaining treatment about 70% of the time. -. But for living wills to be effective, individuals must be able to generate preferences that are stable over time and across changes in health. In studies that examined the stability of advance directives, participants were asked to record their preferences for various life-sustaining treatments (e.g., cardiopulmonary resuscitation [CPR]) in different medical scenarios, such as coma. After an interval ranging from one month to two years, these individuals recorded their preferences again. The average stability of preferences across all judgments was 71%, suggesting that over time periods as short as two years, there were substantial changes in stated treatment preferences