palliative care

Maggie Maher, a health blogger we read regularly, has a poignant post today about untreated pain, inappropriately aggressive high-tech care, and the lessons that young medical students (not to mention some older doctors) still must learn about why "good care" and "cure" are not synonymous.

Maher spent some time with Dr. Diane Meier, a geriatrician and national leader in palliative medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, and she watched Meier share with medical students some of what she has learned about how to help seriously ill or dying patients. I learned a lot from Meier and her colleagues at the Center to Advance Palliative Care last year when I was doing an extensive reporting project on palliative care and hospice. (Click here, here, and here).

For much of 2007, I reported in depth on the growing field of palliative medicine (which isn't the same as hospice -- for starters, it isn't restricted to patients with a six month prognosis). One of the areas that caught my interest was the idea of providing palliative care to cancer patients. Many of these patients may live for months, years, or even decades after their initial diagnosis but at times they still need pain and symptom control, family and psycho-spiritual support, guidance in the technically daunting and emotionally wrenching decision-making they face. Other patients will die. Palliative care can help them make a more timely transition to hospice (which usually takes place at home) or can ease their suffering if they die in the hospital (if they are in one of the expanding number of hospitals that have palliative care specialists).