Before you had severe dementia, you requested food and water be withheld if your mental health greatly declined. Now you have severe dementia and you're hungry and want food. How should everyone treat you?

I found this article interesting and wondered what everyone else thinks about this. I have no fixed opinion about this right now. I found it to be a tricky case more complicated than a standard living will or DNR case.

All of the women in the article clearly stated before they became ill that if they ever got severely debilitated, they wanted to be withheld food and water until they died. All of these women ended up with ended up with Alzheimer’s disease and all of them forgot their original wishes. To varying degrees, these women all communicated that they were hungry and wanted to eat.

Their families wanted the starvation to continue, but the caregivers said they would not withhold food from any patient that asked for it, even if it went against the patients’ living wills.

This is a difficult situation to think about. People are usually unconscious when the living will is dragged out. It must be hard to follow it when the person is awake and asking for care they previously refused. However, when the person is in a state they clearly did not want to be in, how could you refuse their living will?