Question

Extra credit (1 point): Provide a reflection on how you would go about helping a loved decide if they were going to continue with treatment options for a chronic, incurable disease, or move toward hospice care. Share your thoughts about when that decision should be made, by whom, and for what purpose. If you have a personal experience with hospice care for someone you loved, share it if you wish. Each answer should be several paragraphs in length, and make sure you answer all parts of the questions.

Answer 1

Pallative care in hospice has become an accepted mode of managment of terminally ill patient, for whom prognosis is limited, despite the advancment of modern medicine it has not been able to deny the inevitablity of death.Present day practices by medical institutions finds it very difficult to accept a peaceful death as an objective of medicine, but the approach towards death has changed in the present day, with emphasis on quality of life of the dyeing patient rather than puttting him in more pain by administering medicines that cannot cure the disease, but just prolong patients life for few days.

People are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of stopping medication to cure the disease, under these circumstances it is better to consult hospice staff members, who are generally proffesional enough to give advice regarding your concerns or give you the various options available, ultimately the decision belongs to the patient. sometimes the patient may not be in a state of mind to take a decision on hospice care or end of life care, that is the time when the immediate family members have to take firm decision wheather your loved ones should have a comfortable and peaceful death or just prolong their inevitable death in a painful manner. In his famous novel Amelia, Henry Fielding had wrote, " It is not death but dyeing which is terrible"

Personally I had an experience, when my niece who was just 16 years old developed a tumor, later on it was diagnosed as malignant tumor, it was an heart breaking experience which i find it very difficult to erase from my memory, chemotherapy and radiation was proving to be very ineffective, a point of time had come when the treatment was not finding cure for her disease but was causing her only mental agony and immense pain, which was becoming unberable sight, but no immediate family members were in state of mind to take rational decision, but ultimately i had to convince the family members that quality of life is more important than just prolonging the painful death and we admitted in hospice care where she survived for couple of weeks.