It was an honor to collaborate with the National VSED Advance Directive Committee to create an improved Advance Directive for Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (AD for VSED).
This advance directive allows people who who will eventually lose both capacity and the ability to eat and drink without manual assistance (due to progressive dementia and other conditions) to shorten the natural dying process by the legal options of either completely stopping eating drinking or, if that isn’t possible, to significantly reduce it, called Comfort Feeding Only.
Here are key bullet points about this new dementia VSED advance directive:
- The AD for VSED is available in both downloadable (fill-out-by-hand) and fill-out-online (recommended for ease of use) formats.
- A recent journal article in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics article (open source) authored by the National VSED Advance Directive Committee explains why this directive is the now the best available and includes a table that compares all the available advance directives for stopping manually assisted eating and drinking.
- A Journal of Pain and Symptom Management article, Mr. Smith Has No Mealtimes: Minimal Comfort Feeding for Patients with Advanced Dementia explains an alternative to VSED
- A recent New York Times article also addresses this newer alternative to VSED: Comfort Feeding Only, She didn’t want to live with advanced dementia; so why was she being kept alive?
- A related document, The Living With Dementia Advance Directive, allows people who still have capacity to address issues such as where they want to live, who they want to provide their care, when to stop driving, etc. Elder law attorney, Lisa Brodoff, and Robb Miller created this directive many years ago and recently updated and improved it. Like the AD for VSED this directives is available in both downloadable (fill-out-by-hand) and fill-out-online (recommended) formats.
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