“Nobody wants to die a slow, lingering death. But many Texans do. Half die in hospitals. One in five passes away in intensive care units. Often, their last months of life are expensive, painful exercises in medical futility.” So reads the introduction to “At the Edge of Life,” a five-part series examining the lives touched and challenges faced by the palliative care team at Baylor University Medical Center. The series was written by Lee Hancock and published in the Dallas Morning News in 2008.
In today’s presentation at the AMWA conference – Palliative Care: Collaborative Communication at the Edge of Life – Dr. Robert Fine of Baylor talked extensively about the evolution of the fairly new discipline of palliative care.
For those who aren’t familiar, palliative care is about the care and comfort of patients – and families of patients – with serious illness. The multidisciplinary care team includes physicians, nurses, chaplains, social workers and pharmacists working together to ensure the physical, emotional and even spiritual comfort of the patient.
This team helps patients come to grips with the severity of their illness, and helps them work through the options available to them, even if the only remaining option is pain management as the body fails.
As Dr. Fine so aptly notes, medical science can’t cure mortality. The only thing that we all have in common is death. I may never have an angiogram, and you may never have chemotherapy, but you and I will both die some day. And for as much as we don’t want to talk about that day, I think that we can all universally agree that we want our deaths to have dignity and peace.
I lived through end-of-life challenges with my grandmother. She spent two years on a rapid downward spiral due to nothing more than the geriatric failure that comes when the body wears out in its 80s. When she died in 2003, her local hospital did not have a palliative care option. I would have given my left arm to give her access to the sort of collaborative, compassionate care that can be found at Baylor.
I would love to do anything I could to market this sort of care and bring more attention to the issue, but programs like Baylor’s largely fly under the radar. No hospital wants to advertise themselves as being a good place to die. As a result, palliative care is largely unknown to the general public, and suffers from crises of funding and availability. And yet, it’s hard to imagine any other medical discipline that could be more important, not just to the patients, but to the loved ones that they leave behind. Because sometimes the most important part of medicine isn’t medicine at all: It’s humanity.