If you were travelling alone, were rendered unconscious by an accident, and required a ventilator to survive, you would die under these rules. Chances are you don't currently have a surrogate. There is no court set up in the emergency room, or travelling on the ambulance. Let's just pretend you happened to give your authorization for medical treatment to all the hospitals along your route before you had your accident. So they save your life. Now you're hooked up to whatever machines are necessary.
Once initiated, life sustaining treatments may be ethically withdrawn upon request of the patient, or a surrogate or court acting on the patient's behalf.
All it takes is for some judge, or your surrogate (who might not even be chosen by you) to request removal of that equipment, and you're dead.
Even if the patient is not terminally ill or permanently unconscious, it is not unethical to discontinue all means of life-sustaining medical treatment in accordance with a proper substituted judgment or best interests analysis.
WTF?
FUE, could you ping the list to these articles in post #23? They contain quite a bit of information, most of it scary.
Can you make a thread for the one that has that statement about "not" being terminally ill? That is the kind of stuff that people are really not aware of.
Bump.