It is not death, but dying which is terrible.
Most medical care is, in fact, palliative in contradistinction to preventive or curative care.
In the context of this section, palliative care refers to the care of patients in the terminal stages of illness in whom the goal of medical management is to provide comfort. These admonitions are not new but come from Hippocrates and especially from Thomas Percival, the English physician and philosopher, who published his code of ethics in 1803 and on which the AMA code was originally based. Indeed, from antiquity to the present no one disagrees that a patient's suffering should be relieved. There are two areas that need to be discussed.