Printer-friendly format

Major illnesses involve serious physical and emotional pain and suffering. Even when it leads to a cure, the treatment itself may actually augment the suffering involved with a disease.

Fortunately for patients in South Mississippi, Forrest General Hospital (FGH) is in the process of implementing the region's first palliative care program.

Palliative care, according to the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), is a form of interdisciplinary care that aims to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life for patients, as well as for their families, with life-threatening illnesses.

In some respects, palliative care is similar to hospice care. In fact, the methods of palliative care are precisely those that hospices have been using to help dying patients for decades. Palliation refers to the soothing of a person's symptoms without actually curing his or her underlying disease. Basically, a team of people — typically consisting of physicians, nurses, social workers, and volunteers — seeks to ease a person's physical and emotional pain and suffering.

Though similar in some respects to hospice care, there are some important differences between palliative and hospice care. For example, while for hospice care the patient's life expectancy is typically six months or less to qualify, palliative care can be administered to anyone with a serious illness without stipulations regarding life expectancy. Physicians, then, may initiate palliative care at the time a patient is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.

Another important difference is that a person may continue to receive curative treatments along with palliative care — all appropriate medical treatment options are available.

As Dr. A.J. Jackson, an internal medicine physician at Hattiesburg Clinic and an FGH palliative care physician, said, "Palliative care is care that patients want at the same time as efforts are made to cure or prolong life. It's not giving up on the patient."

Tags:

None