nutritionism …
Schwenkler’s musings must have something to teach us about how we provide food and water to those near life’s end.
Hospice & Palliative Medicine
new opioids …
Journal Club Charles von Gunten moderates a panel discussing the new opioids available. Bottom line … we don’t need new opioids … we need everyone to correctly prescribe and take the ones we have now. (a nice summary and links re REMS is here)
welcome everything … push away nothing …
Frank Ostaseski’s Five Precepts of Service lend a strong foundation to the work of accompaniment … The First Precept: Welcome Everything. Push Away Nothing. In welcoming everything, we don’t have to like what’s arising. It’s actually not our job to approve or disapprove. It’s our task to trust, to listen, and to pay careful attention
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vigil … a sacred word … a sacred time …
“Life is a mystery, and we all acknowledge it, but we don’t really know it. You don’t know the heart, you don’t know the mind, you don’t know the body. You are in front of a mystery, you have to get that straight, and you must be there with awe and trembling because this is
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the key difference between a child and an adult …
… the importance of relationships … “What is the difference between a child who makes a mistake and an adult who makes a mistake? That the child does not sever that bond; he can’t even look at his mistake without seeing it immediately embraced by his mother. On the contrary, what happens to us? We
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whose need is it?
We recently discussed Kelly, Varghese and Pelusi’s article “Countertransference and ethics: A perspective on clinical dilemmas in end-of-life decisions” … an excellent introduction to the many inter-personal, emotional and spiritual realities that inevitably inform any decision, in particular decisions near the end of life. A couple of quotes from the article …
core hpm information …
… please visit the newly added core hospice and palliative medicine information page … content resources … links.
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a parting … Wendell Berry …
A Parting Wendell Berry From many hard workdays in the fields, many passages through the woods, many mornings on the river, lifting hooked lines out of the dark, from many nightfalls, many dawns, on the ridgetops and the creek road, as upright as a tree, as freely standing, Arthur Rowanberry comes in his old age
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a sonnet … from the head of the Social Security Administration …
… Michael J. Astrue who, it turns out, is an award winning poet writing under the pseudonym of A.M. Juster. A Cancer Prayer Dear Lord, Please flood her nerves with sedatives and keep her strong enough to crack a smile so disbelieving friends and relatives can temporarily sustain denial. Please smite that intern in oncology
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on moral certainty & relationships …
The ‘work’ of dying involves the restoration of our relationships – our relationship to ourselves … to others … to God. Luigi Giussani tells us why this is so difficult today …
on moral certainty & relationships … Read More »