NEXT AVENUE - SPECIAL SECTION
Palliative Care is Not Just for the Dying By Nora Macaluso
Palliative care can provide relief to people with severe, but not necessarily life-ending, health conditions. But often patients — and their doctors — don't realize they can take advantage of a team-based treatment approach that may include social workers and community support. "The big misconception about palliative care in general is that you need to be dying to get it," said Dr. Andrew Esch, a palliative care specialist for the Center to Advance Palliative Care in Tampa, Fla. The pandemic has helped counter that view as physicians see the benefits to people living with COVID-19 and their families. A palliative care team aims to take a holistic view of the patient's world rather than focusing solely on treating the primary condition. Dr. John Mulder, of Spring Lake, Mich., executive director of palliative care training center Trillium Institute, uses "life-defining" or "life-altering" to identify conditions that might benefit from palliative care. "Many, many individuals as they navigate their lives are going to be diagnosed with something that is going to forever change them, and it's going to impact their longevity, impact their quality of life, and can place some burden of suffering upon them," he said. "What we do in palliative care is acknowledge the fact that we have something we can't fix," Mulder continued. "It might be modifiable, it might be manageable, but we can't fix it."
People with cancer, for example, can rely on the symptom-based approach of palliative care to build their strength so they're better able to withstand chemotherapy, he said. People with conditions like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease can also benefit, as can those with Alzheimer's disease. As Esch sees it, one of the real values of palliative care is "coordinating care and communicating with the patient's family and other clinicians" so "we're not doing things in silos," he said. "Palliative care takes the lead and makes it so the patient feels they have four doctors and nurse practitioners taking care of them, and they have four of them talking to each other." “Getting palliative services doesn't mean that you are somehow giving up on treating an illness. It's quite the opposite.”
Read more of this story on Next Avenue.org.
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