Yes: More Palliative Care

Yes, yes, yes. We need much more emphasis on palliative care rather than assisted suicide.

Focus on palliative care, not suicide: doctor

A landmark case on doctor-assisted suicide is heading to the B.C. Appeals Court in March, but some doctors fear the hot-button issue is drawing focus away from a different, and widely used form of end-of-life care.

Dr. Romayne Gallagher works with the palliative care program at Providence Health Care, which aims to alleviate suffering for the dying.

She argues the highly-controversial practice of assisted suicide would serve just a fraction of terminally ill patients. more

The Need For Better Education About Palliative Sedation

Palliative sedation is distinct from euthanasia because the intent is not to cause death, but to provide palliation until natural death occurs.

Palliative sedation a 'peaceful way to die'

Within 10 minutes of having her first dose of sedative, Col Pieper's terminally-ill mother drifts to sleep.

A medication pump is set up to continuously give her the sedative midazolam to ensure she stays asleep until she dies.

Three and a half days later, she dies peacefully, as she had chosen.

Pieper, a West Coast-based registered nurse, says her mother had originally wanted to be euthanised, but switched her thinking only weeks from death once she learned about palliative sedation.

She could choose because she lived in the Netherlands, one of a few countries in the world to legalise euthanasia. more

NZ Palliative Care Sanity Counters The Pro-Deathers

Yes, yes, yes – palliative care – GOOD palliative care – is much more needed for people who are terminally ill than talk of assisted or other killing.

Doctor: euthanasia not the answer

A Tauranga doctor says palliative care, not euthanasia, is the better option for patients, family, friends and doctors of cancer sufferers. more

Media Spins Death In New Zealand

Here’s another report of how the media spin death making – this time from New Zealand

Palliative Medicine Society goes on the front foot

For those who don’t understand the ‘front foot’ comment, it’s a cricketing term meaning that the batsman goes on the attack. The Australian & New Zealand Society of Medicine have done just that over a story run on New Zealand TV last night. (60 Minutes program on TV3 story: “Fixing to Die”).
To say that the show lacked objectivity would be an understatement. more

Confusing End Of Life Issues Is No Help At All

This is a very confusing report – I’m not aware of anyone who opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia suggesting that palliative care and palliative sedation are “euthanasia.” If there are people who are making such charges, they are pretty ignorant of the issues they’re talking about.

End-of-life care: Pain control carries risk of being called a killer

Three decades after hospice emerged as the standard of care for terminally ill patients, the end-of-life treatments that palliative medicine physicians provide are frequently referred to as murder, euthanasia and killing.

More than half of hospice and palliative medicine physicians say patients, family members and even other health professionals have used those terms to describe care they recommended or implemented within the last five years, according to a nationwide survey of 663 palliative care doctors in the March Journal of Palliative Medicine. more

UK Call For Better Palliative Care

Here’s a very poignant story from the UK about a father’s slide into Alzheimer’s disease, and the urgent need for good palliative care.

How could any carer scold an old man just for doing up his buttons wrongly? Arlene Phillips recalls her father's death from dementia

Alzheimer's reduced my father Abraham, an intelligent, smart and self-sufficient man, to a pitiful shell of a human being.

Almost the last sentence he ever articulated was: ‘I’ve lived my life now. I just want to curl up in the woods and go to sleep.’ This was how he expressed his  frustration and desolation with a life that, in the end, held no purpose.

He no longer recognised my sister and me. Simple words eluded him. Although he had always loved to read, the written word became a mystery to him. All that remained of his humanity, in truth, was his stubbornly beating heart.

It was sorrowful that my sister and I should have seen him so reduced — to the extent that I now think Dignitas would have been the right option for him. It sounds drastic, but it would have spared him that final slide into emptiness and bewilderment. more

Brit MP: Better Palliative Care, Not Killing

Here's another Brit MP making an excellent point - we need more care for the suffering and dying, not consider killing them.

Good Piece On Addressing The Needs Of Patients With Advanced Dementia

Medical types are starting to recognize that the standard of care for dementia patients is woefully low. Part of this is because dementia is a complicated diagnosis and is not yet fully understood. This article explores how dementia atients might best be helped.

Advanced Dementia: State of the Art and Priorities for the Next Decade

Abstract

Dementia is a leading cause of death in the United States. This article outlines the current understanding of advanced dementia and identifies research priorities for the next decade. Research over the past 25 years has largely focused on describing the experience of patients with advanced dementia. This work has delineated abundant opportunities for improvement, including greater recognition of advanced dementia as a terminal illness, better treatment of distressing symptoms, increased access to hospice and palliative care services, and less use of costly and aggressive treatments that may be of limited clinical benefit. Addressing those opportunities must be the overarching objective for the field in the coming decade. Priority areas include designing and testing interventions that promote high-quality, goal-directed care; health policy research to identify strategies that incentivize cost-effective and evidence-based care; implementation studies of promising interventions and policies; and further development of disease-specific outcome measures. There is great need and opportunity to improve outcomes, contain expenditures, reduce disparities, and better coordinate care for the millions of persons in the United States who have advanced dementia. more