Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families' facing problems associated with life-threatening illness. It’s a Medical care which focuses on alleviating the symptoms through:
- Early identification of illness and problems associated with it.
- Impeccable assessment of medical conditions.
- Treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial, and spiritual problems.
It aims to ease pain, manage symptoms, and reduce the stress caused by chronic conditions while working to improve life for both patients and their loved ones.
Many people mix up palliative care with hospice care. Hospice focuses on care during the final stages of an illness, but palliative care is different. It is available to people of any age and for any severe health problem. It focuses on easing symptoms of the illness and can be given along with treatment for the main condition.
At KIMS Hospitals, Mahadevapura, palliative care starts during the patient's stay at the hospital. A group of experts collaborates with patients, their families, and the medical staff to address any specific needs or worries. A board-certified palliative care doctor leads this service. The team includes a Palliative care nurse, Counselling psychologist, Medical social workers, and sometimes a multidisciplinary team of doctors. They also coordinate with a dietitian, physiotherapist, speech and swallow specialist and other supportive departments when needed.
Why Choose Palliative Care?
When you or someone you love is going through a serious illness, it can feel overwhelming and uncertain. Having the right kind of support can bring comfort, clarity, and peace of mind. Here's why palliative care is beneficial:
- Relief from tough symptoms like pain, trouble breathing, feeling tired, nausea, constipation, loss of hunger, and trouble sleeping.
- More ease in handling your daily routine, focusing on quality of life.
- Better ability to handle medical treatments for patients as well as care givers.
- Extra treatment options like yoga, music, or aromatherapy.
- A clearer understanding of your condition and medical care choices.
- Emotional or spiritual guidance for patients and their families.
- Assistance with navigating the healthcare system and planning support after leaving the hospital.
Who Needs Palliative Care?
Anyone can receive palliative care, no matter their age, prognosis, or whether they’re being treated to cure their illness. Doctors provide palliative care to people with different health issues. These health issues can include a variety of conditions, such as:
- Cancer: Through every phase of cancer treatment palliative care focuses on controlling pain, tiredness, nausea and emotional struggles.
- Stroke: Focuses on improving quality of life by addressing pain, symptoms, and emotional distress for patients and families and supports decision-making, rehabilitation goals, and end-of-life care when recovery is limited
- Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): To address ALS symptoms, palliative care manages muscle weakness, breathing issues, and problems with communication as the condition worsens.
- Alzheimer’s disease: It helps patients, and their caregivers deal with behavioural changes and plan as cognitive abilities decline over time.
- Heart disease: For chronic heart conditions, it handles symptoms like chest discomfort, breathlessness, and tiredness.
- HIV and AIDS: This focuses on handling physical symptoms, emotional health, and side effects from treatments for people who live with HIV or AIDS.
- Kidney disease: Palliative care improves life by easing symptoms, guiding treatment choices, and focusing on comfort in chronic or advanced kidney disease.
- Liver disease: It provides relief for issues like pain, tiredness, itching or confusion caused by problems with liver function.
- Lung illnesses such as COPD and emphysema: Care aims to reduce breathlessness, stress, and other uncomfortable symptoms linked to long-term lung problems.
- Multiple sclerosis (MS): This care helps address pain, tight muscles, fatigue, and challenges with thinking to make everyday tasks more manageable.
- Parkinson’s disease: Palliative care helps manage symptoms, maintain movement, and support mental health as the condition worsens.
- Stroke: It helps recover or adapt by focusing on pain relief, speech challenges, movement issues, and emotional support following a stroke.
Symptom Relief
Palliative care works to ease symptoms that affect your body, mind, or emotions. The team providing palliative care might give you direct support or show you ways to feel better in your daily life.
Some symptoms palliative care can address include:
- Pain or discomfort: Medicines, Minimally invasive intervention like nerve blocks, steroid injections, trigger point injections which help in easing pain.
- Anxiety: People can use methods like relaxation exercises, therapy sessions, or medicines to lower feelings of unease and nervousness.
- Constipation: Adding specific foods to your diet, staying active, or using laxatives can make bowel movements easier to manage.
- Depression: Managing sadness or hopelessness often involves therapy, medication, or even effective counselling to lift one’s mood.
- Fatigue: Techniques like saving energy throughout the day, encouraging healthy eating, and doing light exercises, breathing techniques can reduce exhaustion.
- Loss of appetite: Stimulating appetite, adjusting meals, and controlling nausea are ways to improve eating habits.
- Nausea: Taking medications or changing what you eat can keep nausea in check and stop vomiting.
- Shortness of breath: Breathing can get better with oxygen, special exercises, or medicine.
- Stress: Talking to counselors, practising mindfulness, or leaning on spiritual care reduces mental pressure.
- Trouble sleeping: Following better sleep habits, using soothing routines, or taking medicine can help improve sleep.
Technique We Use
Your palliative care team might ease symptoms using these methods:
- Breathing exercises: These can help you ease shortness of breath and stay calmer if you feel out of breath.
- Cognitive exercises: Activities to sharpen memory and support focus can help with emotions and mental clarity.
- Exercise guidance: Gentle and customised movements can boost your energy, strength, and mood.
- Medication prescriptions: They may provide medicine to reduce pain, nausea, trouble sleeping or anxiety.
- Relaxation exercises: Techniques like muscle relaxation or guided imagery may calm your body and mind.
- Sleep improvement tips: Ideas like keeping a routine at bedtime avoiding screens or following a sleep schedule might help you rest better.
Pain Control Services
At KIMS Hospitals, Mahadevapura, our Pain Management Service works to ease pain caused by surgery, injury, or sudden illness. We use modern pain-relief methods like patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) and epidural analgesia. These methods help patients heal faster and leave the hospital with reduced discomfort.
We take a team-based approach that puts patients first to check and manage pain.
Combining tried-and-tested treatments with newer options, like continuous peripheral local anaesthetic catheters, helps to improve pain relief for patients.
The pain management team works together to help patients with complex pain issues. They handle methods like PCA, epidural catheters, and peripheral local anaesthetic catheters to manage acute pain.
Patients struggling to control their pain in the hospital can meet with a pain management expert. Doctors can arrange a consultation with the pain management service at any time. Nurses or patients themselves can also reach out to the pain management nurse practitioner when pain becomes hard to manage.
Pain management, a growing medical field, offers many tools and techniques to support those dealing with acute or chronic pain.
Ongoing medical research and better insights into how pain affects people have contributed to pain management.
Acute or Chronic Pain
Acute pain might feel sharp shooting which can be severe or mild. It can come on and go away fast, or it might stick around for longer. This type of pain often acts as a warning sign for something serious in the body, like a broken bone or a burn. Treating the cause or letting it heal makes acute pain go away.
Chronic pain is pain which lasts for more than 3 months and often persists even after injuries have healed. It can come with physical signs like tight muscles or feeling worn out, plus emotional struggles like anger or nervousness. Pain from arthritis, headaches, or lower back issues falls under this. Sometimes chronic pain happens because of nerve damage, leading to feelings like burning, shock like sensation, often associating with tingling and numbness, also feels like stabbing or prickling like sensations. Cancer is another big source of chronic pain and can affect someone’s life making symptom management essential for living.
Some people are more sensitive to pain than others, while others might feel physical pain because of mental health challenges like depression.
Managing pain plays a crucial role in treating many medical issues and circumstances. People coping with intense pain from cancer or its treatment often require a clear plan to handle pain. Others are healing after major surgeries or significant injuries, as well as those with ongoing pain in their back or joints, see the importance of focused pain care. This approach not only helps them recover quicker but also improves their overall results.
Treatment Choices for Pain Management
Pain medicine specialists explore many treatment choices tailored to a patient’s specific needs. Some of the most frequent choices are:
- Medication: You can often find relief from pain with over-the-counter painkillers or medicated creams and gels. When the pain is intense, doctors recommend stronger options like codeine, morphine, or sometimes an antidepressant, anticonvulsant, or muscle relaxant.
- Minimally Invasive Pain Intervention (MIPSI): Doctors inject a mix of drugs into the problem area or nerve with a needle under USG or C-Arm guidance to lower pain, decrease swelling, or ease nerve irritation.
- Electrical nerve stimulation: This method helps stop or dull pain signals and can also minimise swelling, irritation, or muscle spasms.
- Surgery: Doctors can often manage painful conditions without surgery, although treatments may become less effective over time. When severe pain does not improve with other methods, patients might need surgery to fix the underlying issue.
- Physiotherapy: Exercises focused on stretching and building strength help increase flexibility and physical endurance. Specialists in physical rehabilitation design custom programs to give patients the best possible outcomes.
- Alternative treatments: Managing pain might include techniques like acupuncture, Trigger injections, deep tissue massages, relaxation methods, TENS, biofeedback, or whirlpool therapy as part of a broader treatment plan.
- Counselling: Talking with a counsellor or psychologist can provide support to cope with emotions such as anger or sadness, which might worsen pain or contribute to depression.
Tests and Assessments We Perform to Diagnose Pain
To manage pain, the first step involves assessing and diagnosing it. At KIMS Hospitals, Mahadevapura, our doctor begins by reviewing the patient’s medical history and performing a physical examination.
Various tests exist to figure out what causes the pain and to rule out certain conditions.
These tests include:
- CT scan: X-rays and computers work together to create detailed cross-section images of the body.
- MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging relies on a big magnet, radio waves, and a computer to make images of the body without needing X-rays.
- Diagnostic nerve block: Pain can sometimes have different sources making it tricky. Nerve blocks help pinpoint specific pain sources, figure out what contributes to the pain, and create a good treatment plan.
- Myelogram: Like a discography, a contrast dye is put into the spinal canal. This test is often paired with an X-ray to check the area better.
- EMG: Doctors use this test to check how muscles respond to signals sent by the brain, spinal cord, or nearby nerves.
- Bone scans: These scans help doctors find and track bone problems like infections, breaks, or other disorders.
- Ultrasound imaging: It creates pictures of internal organs and tissues by using sound waves at a high frequency.