"For most of the last 20 or 30 years, hospice has been the main focus of end-of-life care, providing both management of pain, nausea, delirium, shortness of breath and other distressing symptoms while also providing psychosocial and spiritual support for patients and families, usually at their home." But hospice generally requires people to give up curative — what doctors call “disease-modifying” — care, which may mean hurtling off an emotional cliff as this implies accepting the imminence of death. Hospice is available to patients expected to live six months or less, which may or may not be easy to predict, depending on the disease, and the individual. | So people often put off seeking hospice care until they are quite close to death — or they never seek it at all, increasing the odds of dying in the hospital, quite possibly hooked up to invasive machines in an ICU. Palliative care has grown over the last decade or so in an attempt to give people a similar multipronged approach to serious illness — without having to give up curative treatment or be on the brink of death. But it is not always available, and often misunderstood. Practitioners hope this study helps them clear up the myths and establish the benefits, enabling them to make the case for offering it to more patients earlier in the course of their disease." |
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