Calling for a Palliative Care Culture

Calling for a Palliative Care Culture
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Palliative care, the “medicine of the future,” (Dr. Carlos Centeno) has more than a clinical dimension. It has social and political dimensions that spring from its grounding in a commitment to relieve total pain, which includes spiritual pain. The social and political dimension of palliative care has the potential to heal body politics damaged by systematic indifference to what societies perceive as unworthy and unsuccessful. It heals by normalising new ecologies of care that honor and include patients, providers, families, and the wider community. The novel patterns, or resonances, characteristic of palliative care, paradoxically, embody the classical virtues of practical wisdom (skill), generosity, compassion, courage, friendship, and prudence. They provide an interpretive key to optimal (evolving) human functioning that perfects, rather than challenges, conventional, or curative medicine.

The approach proclaims, through its praxis, that how individuals die matters to the health and well being of the society, polity, or state. Simply put, the how, why, and wherefore, of every single death, however anonymous or humble, either damages or dignifies the body politic as a whole. As John Donne said many centuries ago, in lines that are just as relevant today, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.” (MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)

Our medicalised modern cultures render reason and mystery mutually exclusive, define death by disease as failure, and dying as disgraceful. Providers and policymakers alike marginalise ageing and dying individuals, while formulating largely ineffective strategies to prevent deaths from violence or epidemics, terrorism, and famines. Deaths in pain and distress without without palliative care and pain relief, in remote villages and slums, do not compel political attention or budgets. It is palliative care’s mission to demonstrate that each is morally significant, restoring patients’ and families’ quality of life where possible, and attending meticulously to the dying period when necessary.

Palliative care enacts new patterns and algorithms that signify an evolutionary turn. As Sir Julian Huxley noted in his preface to Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man, “Evolution…becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organized system of awareness, a combined operation of knowing, feeling, and willing. [This] gives rise to new patterns of cooperation, new organizations of awareness, new and often wholly unexpected possibilities have been realized.” (Huxley Introduction, Phenomenon of Man, Teillhard de Chardin)

Palliative care is one such “new pattern of cooperation and new organisation of awareness.”

Building policy support for palliative care requires presenting it in a positive, albeit instrumental, light: palliative care can be preventive: protecting caregivers and family members against stress induced disease; it can heal: attend to multigenerational wounds and fractures. It can support productivity and participation: basic pain relief and essential services can restore patients’ and families’ autonomy and independence, restoring them to one another and to the community. Policy makers need to see palliative care as an investment, rather than a costly add-on. Developing it will stimulate a palliative culture. A palliative culture privileges presence and accompaniment in the last chapters of life as an honour and a privilege, rather than a burden; as an opportunity for enrichment and spiritual growth of patients, families and caregivers, rather than a dreaded chore assisted dying could take care of.

Lack of palliative care in more than 80% of the world, and lack of palliative care medicines, which contain “narcotic drugs,” has driven what experts call the “global pandemic of untreated pain.” (ESMO Press Release, 9.29. 2012) A palliative culture is halting and slowly reversing this pandemic, whose source is cumulative indifference and ignorance that dates back to the golden age of imperialism. Ending the pandemic, bringing healing to damaged body politics, embodies the structural grace of palliative care praxis, where, holographically, the part contains all the information to change the functioning of the whole.

Each palliative care team at each bedside of each person with a life-limiting illness, prefigures and ushers in the Beloved Community, in a process that resembles stem cell therapy at the heart of healthcare systems. By being person- rather than disease-centered, palliative culture enfolds the marginalised Other into the whole, thereby enhancing the collective emotional intelligence, an evolutionary marker.

The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.

In healing the scattered members come together.

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

("What Are People For," Wendell Berry)

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