What is palliative care?

Palliative care consists in providing pain relief to a person with a serious or life -threatening disease. Emphasis is placed on symptoms and treatment of pain, as well as mental and emotional health and help with spiritual needs. It does not focus on death, but rather on compassionate quality of life for life. In addition, it provides care and support to family and close to patients with treatment. For example, although there are treatment of cancer and AIDS that can prolong the life or possibly even cure the patient, palliative care gives patients relief from pain, nausea and other side effects caused by treatment or the disease itself. In a not distant past, healthcare professionals were primarily aimed at healing the disease, regardless of the cost of the Napacient. Only in the last century did we find effective anesthesia and killer pains that provide patients with some relief from agony trauma, surgery and terminal.

The term comes from the Latin Paliatus , which means "masked". The idea is that palliative care is not heated or treated, but rather tires or obscures pain and other unpleasant side effects of the disease and terminal disease. The root word, paiva , in fact means "alleviate without treatment". This is not to say that palliative care and healing are completely exclusive; The aim is rather relief, not treatment.

palliative care was very useful in maintaining the controversy of voluntary suicide supported by a doctor. It may be the difference between a gentle, peaceful step from life to death, and by which the patient suffers so much and so long that euthanasia is the only hum.

Care can start in a hospital, hospice or home environment. While palliative care is in normal medical use, as with all health problems, patients may have to speak for themselves or have advocates to speak on their behalf to get itheld. It is available and can improve the patient's quality of life.