Palliative Medicine

 Palliative Medicine

 No one is good or bad in the treatment of, especially palliative patients. 

Palliation helps a patient feel more comfortable and improves the quality of life but does not cure, be it cancer or other life-threatening diseases.

The life expectancy, can be increased sometimes in the patients who have a positive outlook, perhaps days to weeks rarely months- plus or minus suffering. 

In the biliary tract cancer patient, the stenting is to improve the quality of life and unlikely to prolong the life of the patient.

 As stenting, - May or may not improve the itchiness secondary to jaundice if it is unable to reduce post stenting. 

Thus the best person to know the status of the patient and the quality of life of the patient is PALLIATIVE PHYSICIAN AND TEAM. As such, they are the best person for the patient as the guardian of their condition.

 Coming to surgeons and physicians, they are curative doctors with various procedures and medications available for cure with less concern for patients plight.

 They sometimes decide to do some procedure to the patients to help, but the specialists are in denial as they know it won’t work. 

At times they feel, they had done something within their ability. Despite the patient dies. So they console themselves- as they are not trained to face death which they consider failure of their treatment. 

However, palliative medicine understands death is a natural process and not avoidable. But the quality and care during that period are very important and that is sometimes lacking in curative doctors that is how palliative medicine developed. 

We have two problems in Palliative Medicine:-

1. There is not many palliative physicians  and still they handle curative patients. Thus sometimes they undergo dilemmas and stress of dealing with the dying.

2. Curative doctors in contrast don’t know how to face death. So they go all out giving treatment sometimes over treat and cause suffering or death secondary to procedures. 

So we need a balance of both. It will take many years in our country to care for PALLIATIVE PATIENTS like developed countries which has a dedicated hospital for palliative care.

Meantime doctors who care for palliative patients  are doing the right and best care within their abilities. By the way, if the palliative doctors have doubts about whether they are acting GOD. My answer is no. As the life of patients is in the hand of the Decider. The care of the patients is in the hands of palliative doctors'.