Palliative Care for Pain Management
What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness. This type of care is focused on providing relief from the pain, symptoms and stress of the illness. The goal is to improve quality of life and relieve suffering for the patients and their families. Recent studies, including one published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have shown that patients with a serious illness who received palliative care lived longer than those who did not receive this care.
When should someone be offered Palliative Care?
Palliative care is based on the needs of the patient, not on the patient’s prognosis. It is appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness, and it can be provided along with curative treatment.
Why is Palliative Care important for you?
The goal of palliative care is to relieve suffering and provide the best possible quality of life for patients and their families for as long as possible. Palliative Care Providers take a whole person approach to pain and believe that treating a patient’s nausea, depression, fatigue, constipation, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and anxiety help improve one’s suffering. At Center for Pain and Supportive Care, Palliative Care Providers work alongside Interventional Pain Providers to deliver the most holistic care possible to patients.
Palliative Care vs Hospice Care
While the objective of both hospice and palliative care is pain and symptom relief, the prognosis and goals of care are different. Palliative Care is delivered at any age and at any stage in a serious illness, and can be provided along with curative treatment. Hospice is focused on comfort care without curative intent; the patient no longer has curative options or has decided not to pursue treatment, choosing instead to focus on quality of life.
Palliative Care Approaches (Treatments) to Pain Management
Palliative Care Providers look at the whole person when managing pain and suffering. The goal is to reduce symptoms including nausea, depression, fatigue, constipation, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and anxiety. To achieve this goal bio-psycho-social support, nutritional optimization, medications, injections, advanced pain procedures, and other holistic treatments are used or recommended.