Dealing with any type of illness that places serious limits on your quality of life can be a unique challenge, but palliative care professionals are available to assist you. Palliative care is focused on dealing with the concerns of folks who have illnesses that cannot be cured but are not expected to be immediately life-threatening. This means specialists are generally focused on a longer timeline than nurses and hospice care providers. A professional can help you address these 5 areas of concern.
Diet
One of the biggest worries about clients who require palliative care is that many are prescribed medications that curb appetite or make them feel sick when they do eat. It's important to create a diet that doesn't upset the digestive system, and a professional can set up a schedule that can be followed. By keeping up a patient's strength, it may be possible to reduce the number of emergency room visits a person has. Diet is also critical to preventing a long-term illness from becoming life-threatening.
Pain Relief
Pain management choices, especially when facing long-term problems related to issues like difficult cancers, often end up being very personal choices. Some people will want to focus on minimizing the perceived loss of awareness and control that accompanies the use of strong pain-killing medications. A palliative care specialist can also point patients toward physical therapy options that might curb pain.
Symptom Relief
Devising ways to relieve suffering from the symptoms of an illness is critical to establishing some degree of quality of life. A palliative care practitioner can help you address questions about how different solutions may interact.
Specialized Advice
Different conditions can have wildly varying symptoms. A palliative care specialist, however, can work with a client to produce a highly individualized patient care plan.
Social Concerns
Being severely sick can lead an individual to become more socially isolated, and palliative care professionals can work with patients to see that they maintain some level of activity and interaction. They also tend to have training working with individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and those with different levels of support from their families.
In cases where clients do have strong support networks of friends and family members, palliative care providers can still help to reduce demands placed on them. This allows supporters of patients to spend more time in their normal social roles, increasing the benefits of personal contact.