How to Protect Yourself When You Can No Longer Speak

When you cannot speak for yourself, someone else must.

In emergency departments, operating rooms, and intensive care units, clinicians need an answer fast—often before families have grasped what’s happening. Who decides whether a new medication is started, a breathing tube is placed, or treatment continues?

Without a clear answer, the hospital moves ahead by default. Care advances incrementally, decision by decision, across hours and clinical teams. The breathing tube stays in. Sedation deepens. Each step is meant to stabilize, to buy time. Each one makes sense on its own.

By the time families discuss wishes, the question is no longer whether to begin, but whether to stop.

This default path carries real weight: pain, side effects, prolonged suffering, mounting costs, and the risk of treatment that overrides what the patient would have wanted or even violates their deeply held values.

A health care proxy, sometimes called a durable power of attorney for health care, names the person who can decide when you cannot. It gives one person the authority to say yes or no to what follows: which procedures are performed, which machines are used, and when care continues or stops.

These decisions can shape how long you live and how much you suffer.

Many people assume that choosing your proxy matters only as we age. In practice, it matters much sooner. A 2023 study of young adults undergoing anesthesia at a children’s hospital found fewer than one in three had named a proxy, despite expected temporary impairment.

Absent a proxy, most states default to surrogate laws—spouses first, then adult children, parents, or siblings. In practice, those rules often collide with real family dynamics.

Doctors may find themselves speaking with several relatives, each with a different view—one pushing aggressive treatment, another restraint, a third joining by phone with partial facts and strong opinions. Care continues amid the struggle. Disagreements can linger long after the crisis, leaving families with years of doubt and regret.

Naming a proxy prevents such situations. It is not about choosing the person who loves you most or who has the most medical knowledge, but the one who can listen, ask hard questions, and stay steady when answers are incomplete and time is short. Ultimately, it’s the person who will best honor your wishes.

For more information see Sheramy Tsai “How to Protect Yourself When You Can No Longer Speak,” The Epoch Times, January 29, 2026.