ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2016
The near-failure of advance directives: why they should not be abandoned altogether, but their role radically reconsidered.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Value Bias and Ethnocentrism and its Effect on Advance Care Planning: Mind the Gap.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Advanced cancer patients' knowledge and opinions regarding the French law on advance directives: a multicenter cross-sectional study.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2026Article
- Determinants of advance-directive completion for end-of-life preparedness among older Korean adults.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- An "ethics of strangers"? On knowing the patient in clinical ethics.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2024Article
- Advance directives from haematology departments: the patient's freedom of choice and communication with families. A qualitative analysis of 35 written documents.BMC palliative care · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Advance directives (ADs) have been hailed for two decades as the best way to safeguard patients' autonomy when they are totally or partially incompetent. In many national contexts they are written into law and they are mostly associated with end-of-life decisions. Although advocates and critics of ADs exchange relevant empirical and theoretical arguments, the debate is inconclusive. We argue that this is so for good reasons: the ADs' project is fraught with tensions, and this is the reason why they are both important and deeply problematic. We outline six such tensions, and conclude with some positive suggestions about how to better promote patients' autonomy in end-of-life decision. We argue that ADs should continue to be an option but they cannot be the panacea that they are expected to be.
Indexed as
Identifiers
27151078What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.