Advance Medical Directive Act

There are many patients in the world who are terminally ill and has lost their consciousness and state of mind. Thus, to help support their bodies to function as usual so that their physical being still lives on although their mental consciousness might be already dead or non-active, doctors make use of modern technology to replace the malfunctioned brain or other organs to run properly. Without the aide of these machines, these paients would then die. However, the government has come out with the Advance Medical Directive Act whereby the patient, or the patient's relatives (if the patient were to be unconscious), can decide to stop the treatment by the hospital and allow the patient to die a dignified, peaceful death without having need to continue suffering with their medical conditions day by day. However, this act is only valid if the patient's medical condition is cannot be improved by further support.

Euthanasia as literally translated from its original greek term, means a "good death". It is different from this as euthanasia is the act whereby one advances the rate of the patients facing their death after they have a terminal, incurable illness which causes great pain and suffering to the patient. It is also called mercy killing as the patient is actually liberated from his pain. However, euthanasia is seen as an immoral act compared to the Advance Medical Directive Act as it does not just allow the illness to take over and kill the patient naturally, it actually kills the patient immediately by using cruel methods to speed up the process. This is bad as it does not give the patient a dignified and peaceful death. Thus, I think that the Advance Medical Directive Act is better compared to this barbaric action.

However, for this act, I think that the decision to stop treatment for the patient and to allow him to die should be agreed by not just the patient, but also the people who are directly related to the patient. This is because this type of death may seem "unfair" to some people and may cause deep mental scars and disorders to the love ones of the patient. Thus, to prevent this the death of the patient to cause more sadness to the relatives and even maybe suicides, this act should only be run with the approval of every closely related person to the patient.

Also, the technology and resources required to sustain ones life when they already have a terminal illness is great and this would not be beneficial to both the government and the family of the patient as the longer the person lives, the more resources is "wasted" on him. Although this might seem to be cruel as to label one's life with a price, we must still remember that the patient too, is suffering great pain every moment he lives and would be relieved to have a more meaningful and peaceful death than to suffer on bed all day, knowing that they would still die one day. Thus, this act would be able to kill two birds with one stone.