Regina Greenbaum, now a resident at Northwestern, is pictured with a patient in the palliative care unit at Northwestern University Medical School, where she honed her communication skills as a student. A woman sits in a physician's office, clutching her husband's hand, with tears streaming down her face. She feels alone-abandoned by the medical system and isolated from her family. She wonders if she can muster the strength to endure her constant pain. While this may seem like a fairly typical scenario, it doesn't have to be.
Doctors can treat patients' palliative needs up until their very last breath.
He says palliative care has no set length of time and can take place anywhere, and there is no preconceived drug regimen for pain relief. Unfortunately, until fairly recently, patients were referred only rarely to hospice, and often at a point that was too late to be helpful. After aggressive acute care, patients in their eleventh hour would get a referral to hospice services. Dr. von Gunten is also on the faculty at UCSD School of Medicine, and says that palliative care clinical education is an essential element that's missing from most medical school curricula. He encourages a ladder process-education that reaches out to physicians from medical school, and climbs up through internship, residency, and into practice.