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Why Should We Believe the Promise?

Kevin M. McIntyre, MD, JD

Arch Intern Med. 1995;155(21):2271-2273.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

IN A RECENT issue of the ARCHIVES, Reilly et al¹ undertook to determine whether a simple educational intervention, namely, the mailing of an educational brochure describing advance directives and a copy of the New York State Health Care Proxy form, would encourage outpatients in a community to execute durable health care proxies. In this editorial, the terms proxy and advance directive (AD) will be used interchangeably. Reilly et al reported no notable increase in completed proxies among those who had received the educational intervention (13.3%) and those who did not (11.4%). However, the authors indicated three important predictors of patient proxy completion-older age, previous in-hospital discussion of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) related to ADs with the physician, and execution of a proxy by the patient's personal physician. Neither severity of illness nor admission to an intensive care unit seemed to be related to the execution of a proxy. The most . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Brigham and Women's Hospital Harvard Medical School 160 Commonwealth Ave Suite 801 Boston, MA 02116

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