A Good Life And A Good Death: What Is Palliative Care?
"He will not die on your watch."
That's what the family of a patient told Sunita Puri when she was a resident in internal medicine. They were chilling words for the young doctor as she took over the care of a very sick man on the overnight shift.
To Puri, the patient, who had widespread metastatic liver cancer, appeared to be dying. She tried to talk with the family about forgoing heroic measures, to let him have peace in his last hours. But they were adamant.
"Do everything," they told her. Hours after admitting him to the intensive care unit, she was overseeing chest compressions to revive him after his heart stopped. "I was blinking back tears," she recalls. The man died that night.
Few people would say they want to die while undergoing painful last-minute resuscitation or while hooked up to machines in a hospital. Yet it's the death many Americans end up with. Now a palliative care doctor at the University of Southern California, Puri is fighting for an alternative.
In her , Puri writes about how palliative care specialists are working to change medicine from within — teaching other doctors how to talk to patients about their hopes and fears, not just their disease and treatment. Palliative care, she says, gives
