Health visitor and a senior woman during home visit.

Caring for Patients with Serious Illness: Insights from Kristofer Smith

Kristofer Smith, MD, MPP is the Chief Medical Officer of Landmark Heath, where he oversees efforts to establish a high-quality and clinically effective home-based medical care model for patients with serious illness.

We sat down with Dr. Smith to discuss his experience caring for patients with serious illness and developing programs to provide health care at home, among other topics. The following interview has been edited and condensed. Read More

hand signing form.

Legal Preparedness for Aging and Caregiving

By Sharona Hoffman

During 2013 and 2014, I endured a very difficult 18 months. Both of my parents died, my mother-in-law died, and my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55. As I went through all of this, I learned a great deal about getting older, getting sick, facing the end of life, and caregiving. As a result of my personal experiences and my professional background as a Professor of Law and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, I wrote a book called Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow.

The book addresses many legal, financial, medical, social, and other support systems for aging and caregiving. In this article, I discuss the legal documents that every American adult should have. These documents can help ensure that your finances and health care are well-managed as you age and that your wishes will be followed after death.

Read More

DUQUE DE CAXIAS,(BRAZIL),MAY,20,2020: doctors take care of patients with covid-19 and an intensive care unit (ICU) at hospital são josé specialized in the treatment of covid-19.

A Novel Approach to Crisis Standards of Care

By Stephen Wood

The provision of scarce resources such as intensive care unit (ICU) beds, antivirals, and ventilators during this pandemic has been an ongoing topic of discussion. Repeatedly, states and hospital systems have considered implementing crisis standards of care, which establish triage protocols for scarce resources.

Though crisis standards of care are meant to provide an ethics-based approach to the complex process of allocating scarce health care resources, in reality, they fall short.

Read More

U.S. Capitol Building.

Congress Should Act to Fund Medical-Legal Partnerships

By Emily Rock and James Bhandary-Alexander

On August 9, legislators introduced a new bill in Congress that allocates funding to the development of Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs), in recognition of the important role MLPs can play in the lives of older Americans.

As attorneys with the Medical-Legal Partnership program at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, we strongly encourage Congress to act quickly to pass this legislation.

Read More

Los Angeles, California, United States. June 23, 2021: #FreeBritney rally at LA Downtown Grand Park during a conservatorship hearing for Britney Spears.

There’s More to Decision-Making Capacity than Cognitive Function

The Health Law, Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts. Though the Workshop is typically open to the public, it is not currently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of our presenters will contribute blog posts summarizing their work, which we are happy to share here on Bill of Health.

By James Toomey

The doctrine of capacity is a mess.

From Britney Spears’s high-profile struggles to establish her own capacity to the countless, quiet challenges of so many older adults, the doctrine of capacity, which requires people to have the cognitive functioning to understand the nature and consequences of a decision in order for it to be recognized in law, is vague, normatively and medically challenging, and inconsistently applied.

This is a big deal — at stake in every capacity case is whether, on the one hand, an individual may access the legal rights most of us take for granted, to enter into contracts, buy or transfer property, or get married or divorced; or, on the other, whether the legal system will ratify a decision the “real person” never would have made.

Read More

Map of remote execution requirements for advance directives.

Advance Care Planning in an Online World: State Law Activity and Challenges Since COVID-19

By Nikol Nesterenko, Jonathan Chernoguz, and Sarah Hooper

Advance care planning — the process by which an individual documents their wishes for health care in the event that they become incapacitated — has become particularly urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, individuals that wish to engage in advance care planning, and specifically to document their plans in a written form (i.e., advance directives), have faced significant hurdles due to legal execution requirements. State advance directive law often requires or presumes live, in-person witnessing or notarization, actions which were prohibited by social distancing orders or simply unsafe during the pandemic.

In this piece, we summarize the state of remote execution requirements for advance directives before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Broadly speaking, while many states took some action in this regard, most did not enact comprehensive changes, and therefore failed to meaningfully facilitate remote execution of advance directives.

Read More

Hourglass

A Medical Student Reflects on the Value of Time During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Jess Ma

He passed away on the 107th day. After I got home in the evening, I wrote down everything I could remember about him in my journal. For many days after his death, I often dreamed I was standing in that fluorescently bright ICU room. In the dreams, I would be watching him, and then he would wake up and start speaking to me, with those bright blue eyes glittering with animation and life. I always awoke feeling a little unsettled, not by his death, but rather by the fact that I knew so intimately the ways in which he was kept alive, and yet nothing about the life he lived until just hours before his final breath.

He was an existing patient on the unit when I joined the surgical ICU team, and for 10 days I followed him, tracking how every organ system was doing each day. Everyone on the team knew there was only one way this would end; his quality of life had deteriorated so rapidly since the early summer, after a bout of necrotizing pancreatitis and multiple tragic complications; he was barely able to interact with his own body, much less his environment, and his life was propped up precariously by every possible machine that could perform the function of a vital organ. For him, no medical intervention would add more significant chapters to his story. It was just a matter of when his daughter would be ready to close the book.

Because of the pandemic, visitors were only allowed after 12pm each day. When his adult daughter came to visit each afternoon, I was told to avoid intruding on their cherished private time together. I only ever really saw her shadow behind the drawn curtain as I walked past the room; and I knew that one of the surgeons on the service (a group of surgeons rotated between trauma, acute care, and surgical ICU) would routinely give her calls or meet up with her to discuss how her father was doing, even on days he had off. Surgeons are not generally thought off as doctors who can spend a lot of time just talking to patients – after all, in the time he spent on one of those daily conversations, he could complete an appendectomy. Though neither he, nor the rest of the team, could offer a magic solution, what he offered was crucial – his time.

Read More

Dried psilocybe cubensis psilocybin magic mushrooms inside a plastic prescription medicine bottle isolated on white background.

The Myth of Psychedelic Exceptionalism

By Dustin Marlan

The “latest frontier” in drug law reform is the loosening of legal restrictions on psychedelics, such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, and ibogaine. But not all drug reform advocates are thrilled about this development.

Some are concerned that singling out psychedelics for legalization or decriminalization perpetuates the stigma surrounding other illegal drugs. Most prominently, Dr. Carl L. Hart, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Columbia University argues that all drugs “interact on receptors in the brain to produce their effects… we shouldn’t be treating some drugs as if they’re special while others are somehow evil.”

“Psychedelic exceptionalism” describes an ideology that claims psychedelics should be privileged for reform, but other purportedly more harmful drugs, like heroin and cocaine, should remain prohibited. As journalist Madison Margolin frames the question, “Should psychedelics be treated so differently from other drugs, given that any substance may have the power to soothe or scorch the human psyche, and body too?”

Read More