End-of-Life & Medical Rights
Your rights over your own care and final months: medical aid in dying and where it’s legal, the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment, advance directives, living wills and POLST, the federal Right to Try Act and FDA expanded access to experimental drugs, and hospice and palliative care. These rules vary by state and change often, so confirm current local law.
All End-of-Life & Medical Rights guides
- Medical Aid in Dying: Which States Allow It and How It Works
Where medical aid in dying (death with dignity) is legal, who qualifies, and how the process works — the six-month rule, self-administration, and the state-by-state reality.
- Advance Directives, Living Wills, and POLST: Making Your End-of-Life Wishes Stick
The difference between a living will, a health-care proxy, and a POLST — and how to complete, share, and update them so your end-of-life wishes are actually followed.
- Right to Try vs. FDA Expanded Access (Compassionate Use)
Two ways to seek experimental drugs before FDA approval: Right to Try and Expanded Access (compassionate use). How they differ, what they share, and how to pursue access.
- The Federal Right to Try Act, Explained
What the federal Right to Try Act does: how terminally ill patients can seek experimental drugs outside the FDA process, who qualifies, and the important limits it carries.
- Hospice and Palliative Care: Know Your Rights
The difference between hospice and palliative care, what the Medicare Hospice Benefit covers, your right to pain relief and to revoke, and how these fit end-of-life planning.
- The Right to Refuse Life-Sustaining Treatment
Every competent adult can refuse or stop life-sustaining treatment, even if it means death. How this right works, what Cruzan established, DNR orders, and incapacity.