With people living longer and longer lives, more attention is being paid to the inevitable fact of dying. More people used to be struck down suddenly, whether because of long-untreated conditions like heart disease that led to massive heart attacks or strokes, or simply because the medicine of the past had no answers for their health conditions. Today, though, diagnostic, preventative, and therapeutic techniques have become so advanced that sudden death of this kind has become correspondingly rarer.
Instead, what many more people face today is a relatively long, predictable decline. In some cases, this can last for years, as the progress of a disease that must inevitably be fatal is checked and slowed through advanced medical techniques. In certain of these situations, quality of life can remain high right up until the end, but that is not always so.
In fact, more people today than ever before suffer extensively and intensely before finally passing away. This unfortunate fact is the result of the advanced state and overall quality of the medical care that people can generally expect to receive, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. No person wants to see a loved one suffering, and no individual confronting mortality wants to waste precious days, weeks, or months wracked with pain instead of appreciating the precious, fleeting company of family and friends.
Because of this, more people are become interested in palliative care, whether for themselves or those they care about. A typical Palliative Care Program will focus on keeping a quality of life as high as possible for as long as might be realistic, enhancing the value that people on a path of decline derive from their remaining time.
Given this focus, a well designed Palliative Care Program can be an important supplement to a therapeutic one. While doctors focused on extending a patient’s life put in their best efforts, other experts can take on the important task of ensuring that extended life will be worth living. While death may be inevitable, that is not to say that suffering must dominate the last days of a patient’s life, as many people are now coming to understand and appreciate.
