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Ethical Issues In Palliative Care

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Introduction
What is Cancer?
Cancer is a malignant growth or tumour cause by an uncontrolled division of cells.
How can cancer be treated?
With the advancement of medical science, Cancer (which is in the initial stage) can be cured via “palliative care treatment”. This is a system of care that seeks to relieve suffering in patients with progressive cancer.
Palliative care helps patients suffering from progressive cancer by improving that person’s quality of life.
However, there are many ethical issues associated with this treatment strategy such as:
• Particular methods of pain relief
• Reliable assessment of suffering
• Autonomy and multi-specialist care.
While there is a significant increase in the training of palliative care professionals as well as the development of the infrastructure for providing such care, there is an issue with the availability of resources in the current Indian environment which is building a barrier in the improvement of such professional care to people who require it the most.
In the last decade, supportive and palliative care have been …show more content…

Palliative care in India is believed to have been originated in Kerala in 1986 with the establishment of a pain clinic in the Regional Cancer Center of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala. Since then, one recent 2008 review by McDermott et al identified 138 hospice and palliative care services in 16 states and territories. For resource-poor settings, the efficacy of palliative care implementation has been driven by the synergistic effort of motivation and the use of local resources. The Kerala network, called “Neighborhood Network in Palliative Care,” for example, has more than 60 units covering a population of >12 million and is one of the largest networks in the world. In April 2008, Kerala became the first state in India to announce a palliative care

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