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Advance directives for patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection
1Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Critical Care Clinics
|January 1, 1993
Abstract:
A consensus has emerged in recent years that decisions about life-sustaining treatment made by informed, competent patients should be respected. Advance directives are expressions of a patient's preferences regarding life-sustaining treatments made while the patient is still competent, to be used if the patient loses competence. Patients infected with HIV have a high mortality rate and frequently lose competence as their disease progresses to AIDS. Therefore, the completion of advance directives in this patient group is vitally important.