Against Euphemisms - Part 3 - Palliative Sedation

"Palliative Sedation."Golly I hate this one. Frankly 'terminal sedation' was better, because it was at least less confusing, but  neither of them are clear or transparent, and particularly 'palliative sedation' is just so confusing and potentially laden with too many meanings to be ever useful. There are so many clinical scenarios out there in which someone is sedated (deliberately, or as an aftereffect of trying to control pain/anxiety/dyspnea/etc; deeply or lightly; continuously until death vs temporarily as respite) in circumstances that the average person would agree would be 'palliative' or 'of-palliative-intent' that the term is useless. There have been some people in the literature who call it some variation of 'deep, continuous sedation,' which I like a lot better, because it's a basically accurate description of the practice, at least the practice which is meant most of the time by 'palliative sedation' but not all the time, which sometimes gets contrasted with the 'proportionate palliative sedation' moniker, because there are so many different types of sedation-which-is-palliative, and OH MY GOD, right?If we have a term which needs so much parsing, we need a different term.If the thing you are talking about is deliberately inducing a state of unconsciousness, and keeping a patient in that state until they die, as a means of controlling otherwise uncontrollable symptoms in a dying patient, 'deliberate, deep, continuous sedation in a dying patient' seems about as...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: euphemisms palliative sedation rosielle The profession Source Type: blogs