What Is Palliative Sedation, and How Is It Administered?
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Recent news stories relating to the "end of life" have brought public attention to palliative sedation (PS), a therapeutic procedure about which unfortunately little is known in the healthcare world and among the public. This lack of knowledge stems from the fact that, thus far, university courses have almost never provided for the systematic teaching of palliative care. This shortcoming leads to a certain resistance to its implementation or, even worse, confusion of PS with medically assisted death (MAD), a term that includes euthanasia and medically assisted suicide. Media debate has often contributed to this confusion, although there has been a higher quality of information and a reduction of semantic and conceptual ambiguity in the most recent news stories. The Italian Palliative Care Society (SICP) has published numerous press releases concering PS. To understand the difference between PS and MAD, it is necessary to know the constituent elements of the two procedures.
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@minti In the document titled, "SICP Recommendations on Terminal Sedation/Palliative Sedation," this practice is defined as "the intentional reduction of alertness, up to a loss of consciousness, by pharmacological means to reduce or abolish the perception of a symptom that is otherwise intolerable for the patient, despite the most adequate means having been put in place to control the symptom, which is therefore refractory." The refractoriness of a symptom means the impossibility of adequately controlling it with traditional treatments (ie, those that do not depress the state of alertness) that are tolerable, effective, and viable in the conditions and in the time available by a healthcare professional expert in palliative care.