You misunderstand, it isn't selfish to want it for yourself, but it is selfish to keep someone else alive in a vegetative state. It is so easy to choose 'life' as the correct and right thing when in fact 'death' is the natural and moral thing. Society needs to think about their end of life plans. If your plan is to be fed through IVs, have a foley, breath through a machine, have a butt tube, and foley catheter in for the last 10 years of your life be my guest. Just please don't use any of my tax dollars for that! The sad thing is most people don't chose this for themselves, instead they have a stroke or suffer another handicap and while they are unable to make decisions (probably unable forever) the family chants 'do everything you can'! Medicine can do a lot, but mostly at the end of life it just prolongs misery.
I routinely ask patients their 'code status' and articles like this give them false hope and false belief. Instead of: "do you want us to do cpr if your heart stops and/or intubate" ... I should be saying, "do you want your last dying moment to have someone beating on your chest breaking all your ribs while another person shoves a tube down your throat as you get pumped full of drugs."
You will never forget the first time you push on ribs and feel the crunch, watching the half-dead eyes look up at you as they live their last moments, and wondering if they are feeling their veins burn with drugs being pumped in.
Never mind that the article makes it sound like resuscitation efforts are grand. They aren't at all. The statistics are dismal.
Oh ACLS drugs? Yea, they don't really work to well... even as far back as 1998.. there are newer studies showing that ACLS training is helpful, but the actual drugs make little to no difference.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064498...
Expensive? Probably. "Wasteful"? "Selfish"? Not your call, thankfully.