Palliative Care for Terminal and Non-Terminal Patients
Although palliative care is sometimes viewed as a synonym for care for patients with terminal illnesses, a wide variety of different types of patients can benefit from palliative care. "Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical specialty that focuses on preventing and relieving suffering and on supporting the best possible quality of life for patients and their families facing serious illness" (Meier, McCormick, & Arnold 2015). Palliative care can operate in conjunction with curative methods for non-terminal patients, such as patients experiencing chronic pain, or can be used with patients suffering from terminal illness to make end-of-life care for themselves and their families less painful physically and psychologically. WHO defines palliative care as: "An approach that improves the quality of life ... through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual" (Meier, McCormick, & Arnold 2015).
Palliative care focuses on relief of symptoms versus curing disease. For example, a patient with lung cancer might be prescribed chemotherapy, a treatment which can be extremely stressful in its own right, to cure the disease. Palliative care or pain treatment may be prescribed in conjunction with this treatment to relieve symptoms or, if the patient does not elect to receive treatment, in lieu of this. Regardless of the patient's prognosis, evidence indicates that palliative care can still be beneficial. In a randomized control study of patients with metastatic non -- small cell lung cancer, the group that received palliative care "integrated with standard oncologic care had a better quality of life (QOL), less depressive symptoms, and longer median survival than did those who were assigned to oncologic care alone" (Meier, McCormick, & Arnold 2015).
For terminally ill patients, palliative therapy may include in addition to symptom management counseling about end-of-life issues....
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