Guest: Timothy Ihrig, MD, Palliative Care Physician and CEO of Ihrig MD & Associates
The end comes for all of us. Some, like 100-year-old Robert Allman in Tennessee, will have a surprising number of years to check things off our bucket list: last month Allman parachuted out of an airplane.
For others, the end will come suddenly and too soon. But many of us will spend time in a middle zone, declining unevenly with age or suffering from a long illness or faced with a fast-moving terminal one.
How to make sure those days, months, and years are spent comfortably, and with dignity – that’s the goal of palliative care. The field is generally misunderstood.
A third of US hospitals don’t even offer it to their patients.
But, the growing concern over health care costs in America has given palliative care more of a place in the conversation. Unnecessary interventions at the end of life cost a lot of money and also tend to cause more pain and heartache for patients and their families.
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