Pain Relief

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses pain management for the terminally ill and how dying with dignity and the importance of hospice care have become part of mainstream medicine and mainstream society. It looks at how it has become increasingly acceptable to acknowledge that the most important service that medicine can offer to some patients (and especially those who are terminally ill) is the relief of pain. It focuses on the different ways that nurses can help people not only die with dignity but also how to provide the quality of life that all people deserve, regardless of how much time that they may have remaining.

From the Paper:

"One of the issues important in addressing the treatment of pain in the dying seems almost absurd from the outside but is in fact a serious one: Often doctors have worried about giving the most effective pain relievers to patients because of possible toxicity, possible side effects or "and this is the absurd part" possible addiction. While it does seem absurd for a doctor to withhold morphine from a cancer patient who has a few weeks to live on the grounds that the person might become addicted, such instances do occur, and it has been one of the foci of the hospice movement to remove such doubts from the minds of physicians (Danto in DeBellis etal, 1992, p. 305)."

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