A document called a Living Will can also bring peace of mind to both you and your loved ones because it provides instructions about your end-of-life medical care decisions. However, more comprehensive advance care planning is recommended. For example, if you were incapacitated due to a form of dementia and later contracted cancer, would you want to treat the cancer and if so, how aggressively? In addition, who do you give permission to make other types of medical and car decisions that you cannot even fathom right now? In California and a number of other states, you can include these instructions and permissions in your Advance Healthcare Directive, along with pairing it with a separate legal document called a POLST (a Physicians Order for Life Sustaining Treatment) containing medical orders for emergency personnel.
