palliative care monterey

What Is Palliative Care and How Can I Know if It’s the Right Choice for a Loved One?

Palliative care can be a difficult topic for anyone involved with chronic or potentially terminal illness. People suffering from those conditions often feel like accepting palliative care is tantamount to giving up. Likewise, the person's family will often feel like they've let him down. This is one of the few downsides to the love family members have for each other. Feeling the need to take care of others often results in people shouldering more than they need to. In fact, most of these viewpoints come from a misunderstanding of what's involved with palliative care.

Asking About Palliative Care Suggests the Answer

How does one know if palliative treatment is the right choice for a loved one? The easy answer is that it usually is the right choice if the question has even come up. People seldom ask about palliative treatment when everything is going smoothly. Instead it usually comes up in one of two ways. A person with a serious condition might start to feel as if their condition is causing a negative impact to others. Or a family member taking care of them might start to wonder if they're up to the task. Both parties in this situation want the best for each other. And when the question comes up it's usually in the context of strain appearing in one or both people. It's important to stress that this kind of help is exactly what palliative treatment is all about. It should never be seen as giving up. Instead, the treatment is all about finding quality of life in the midst of difficult medical conditions.

Palliative Treatment Centers on Quality of Life

In reality palliative treatment is heavily focused on quality of life. People often talk about fighting various diseases or conditions. However, it's just the nature of life that people will eventually face a condition which can't be cured. But this by no means should be taken to mean it's the end of the fight for life. One can't always fight for duration of life. But there's always options to increase the quality of life one has remaining to them. And this is exactly what palliative treatment involves. Prior to palliative treatment one is focusing on trying to fight the battle for their health in two different fields. The patient is trying to beat a particular medical condition and retain quality of life. At a certain point it's evident that the condition is going to be a permanent concern. The fight should therefore move into focusing on quality of life.

Medical Care as a Continual Process Which Adapts to Changing Needs

Palliative treatment should therefore be seen as a continuation of the prior efforts. This is also where one sees a shift in how to approach overall care. It's natural to rely on doctors when treating an illness. However, the patient's family members often make the mistake of assuming that they need to take over when treatment shifts to quality of life issues. The problems with this approach should be apparent when one really looks into it. Medical issues should always be handled by professionals when possible. Even when it's possible for people to take on some of that responsibility there's a question of need. Whose needs are being taken care of if a family tries to provide quality of life care?

Family members usually aren't prepared to provide palliative treatment on their own. At the same time they often feel as if they should be able to do so. It can create guilt for both the patient and family members alike. However, the sentiment and need is fully undeserved. Someone should no more be expected to provide palliative treatment on their own than they should be expected to provide services comparable to a medical doctor. Medical resources exist for a good reason. Expert palliative treatment exists to improve the life of both the patient and his or her family. But what exactly is involved with palliative treatment? This can be best understood by considering a hypothetical example of someone located in Monterey County.

Focusing on Medical and Emotional Needs

Consider the example of a daughter hoping to find help for her mother. To begin, she'd want to concentrate on senior care Monterey County style. The emphasis on local care might seem surprising at first. However, senior care Hollister or Monterey County style brings important distinctions. It means that people are able to enjoy a climate and setting which fits in with their needs. Palliative treatment puts a heavy emphasis on comfort. Quality of life is often vastly improved when people find a local social and environmental climate which promotes relaxation.

Next, it's important to keep one point in mind above any other. Palliative treatment focuses on the needs of a patient rather than on the patient's prognosis. This might seem like a small distinction at first. However, one needs to really consider how most medical conditions are treated.

If someone has cancer than almost everything revolves around it. If a doctor asks how the patient feels it's not about whether they're having a pleasant day. The question is always about how a patient's life might provide clues about the cancer. Even loved ones will usually need to focus on the condition. It's not out of any callousness. It's simply that people need to understand the condition in order to understand what a person is capable of at any given time.

Talking over the medical condition helps people understand how to approach the individual at any given time. And this is just the approach which people outside the medical profession are forced into. It's usually their first time dealing with late stage cancer. And the same general philosophy applies to any severely restrictive medical condition. Doctors need to focus on treating the condition. And family members aren't familiar enough with medical treatment to adapt to intuitively adapt to it.

Palliative treatment instead focuses on the patients rather than the conditions they might suffer from. This usually comes as a huge relief to everyone involved. Family members no longer have to feel like they're essentially acting as a medical support team. They can instead be the sons and daughters, husbands and wives, or anything else for their loved ones. For many people palliative care is about resuming an actual life with their loved one.

Finding Relief in the Midst of an Often Difficult Struggle

The person entering into palliative treatment is often relieved as well. It's easy to misunderstand what people are interested in at the end of their journey. People with decade upon decade left to them often find it hard to see the world any differently. However, people closer to the end start to consider what the world will be in the future. And in particular they often find themselves worrying about their loved ones. The idea of the illness wracking their body causing pain to loved ones can become a serious issue. Basically, it's easy to find oneself worrying about causing worry in others.

The person's loved ones often feel the same way before palliative treatment is brought into the discussion. It's easy for a family to worry about causing their ailing loved one additional stress. However, people struggling to meet the needs of such a loved one are usually far less successful in hiding their own pain than one might imagine. The toll it takes on both parties can be significant. And in the end it often risks the last years of someone's life.

Palliative treatment is essentially a choice to never give up on life. It means that people accept the help of the experts in order to maximize quality of life in the midst of difficult medical concerns. And in the end it means that a family can celebrate their ailing loved ones life with them rather than stressing over how to provide proper care. The highest quality is there for the loved one because it's provided by experts. This doesn't just refer to experts in medical care either. These are experts who understand that finding joy in the midst of illness is both possible and a priority.

by VNA & Hospice