What Is Palliative Care And How Can You Help To Provide It?

We all get sick. It’s a fact of life. Indeed, one could argue that getting sick is an important part of maintaining good health. If we never got sick, our immune systems would never be able to function to the best of their ability. It’s why vaccines contain a little bit of the disease it’s intended to fight so that your antibodies can react to it accordingly. There are some illnesses, however, that are beyond the ability of modern medicine (as great as it is) to heal. They can strike any one of us at any age, even if we live a healthy lifestyle. When one is faced with this kind of advanced illness, the only option left to them is palliative care. Here we’ll look at exactly what palliative care is and how you can help to provide it to a loved one if they are faced with advanced illness.

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What is palliative care?

Let’s first of all address what palliative care is not. Palliative care is not simply making people comfortable while they wait for the end. There is an element of this, perhaps, ensuring that those with advanced illness are as happy and comfortable as they can possibly be is a core component of palliative care. But a patient can enjoy palliative care for years. It simply means that medical science does not have the ability to treat the illness in its advanced stage, but it can help to abate the symptoms. It is a multidisciplinary approach to medicine that is usually provided by specialist carers like Spectrum Healthcare. The goal is to improve the quality of life for sick people and may include medicinal pain relief alongside physiotherapy, psychological counselling and even holistic therapies like massage, aromatherapy, reflexology or acupuncture. While it may be appropriate for patients with life limiting illnesses it is certainly not exclusively available to them.

Helping to Understand Choices

One of the core components of the 5 stages of palliative care is helping patients to understand the choices that are available to them to help them live their lives to the fullest. This may include working with a cancer patient to ensure that they understand the treatment options available to them, it can mean helping a sufferer of chronic arthritis find ways to improve their mobility or it could mean helping someone with autoimmune diseases live their life in a way that mitigates their risk of infections that could prove serious.

How you can help

If someone you love is told that they may need palliative care it’s easy to assume the worst. We are psychologically conditioned to leap straight to “worst case” scenarios. It’s important to remain strong and optimistic and encourage the patient to maintain a constant dialog with the care provider. One of the most important resources that you can provide is love. Human beings can cope with pretty much anything if they have the love and support of someone close to them. The wonderful thing about palliative care is that it’s designed with your needs in mind as well as the patient’s. The care staff will be on hand at all times to help you cope with the responsibility and provide practical advice when you need it.