Primary-care and specialist clinicians such as oncologists need some basic skills in promoting comfort, and health-care providers should offer palliative care and hospice when patients and families need or request more advanced support.
Caregiving can be a complicated job. Whether you’re a loved one or a medical professional, the experience is often exhausting and frustrating. But it can also be joyful and deeply rewarding.
Jun 17, 2015 | GenTwenty by Krystel Edwards 1 in 3 of your friends are caregivers, but they feel like no one understands what they’re going through. Providing unpaid support to ill, disabled, or elderly family members has become the new normal…
Background: Withdrawing artificial nutrition in palliative care is an issue that often leads to ethical dilemmas among health care providers, despite clinical guidelines. Objectives: To describe the experience of health care providers confronted with the withdrawing of artificial nutrition at…
September 28, 2015 | KC Chronicle Robert McDonald, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, stated that within two years there will be more than 10 million U.S. veterans who are 65 or older. Millions of caregivers will be…
In my outpatient exam room, we had arrived at that moment of silence that often marks the crossroads of unwelcome news and a difficult decision. My patient, in his mid-60s, had endured a five-week hospitalization after he learned he had…
Significant research exists demonstrating the challenges faced by informal family caregivers as they care for their loved ones. How caregivers react to this experience, especially in the case of a terminal illness, is less understood.
Seniors living in various settings identified obligatory requisites of care as time when the finality of death needed to be accepted, comfort was prioritized, family presence was valued, appearance remained important and solitude was stressed.
These are the things that people say, over and over again, when they are given the opportunity to answer. The real test for physicians, then, is being willing to meet the challenge of discovering our patient’s true wishes, the fulfillment of which may push us well outside our own professional comfort zone.
There are so many difficult situations people face as caregivers of people who have Alzheimer’s. Some are harder to accept than others. Here are three that are among the most difficult of all.