"there is nothing more we can do" usually means that the disease cannot be cured. There are still many things that can be done to promote comfort and ease distress.
The Range of Services Providing palliative care requires special skill and expertise from a variety of health care professionals and includes close attention to controlling symptoms and providing psychosocial and spiritual support. Both patient and family are involved in palliative care to ensure that the patient can live as fully as possible in the face of impending death and the most satisfactory quality of time together can be achieved. Family members benefit from such support during the illness and, later, during their time of grieving.
Palliative care/hospice care is, then, a set of ideas or beliefs about what is important when people are dying and how they can be helped. The ideas have been used to develop special programs or ways of offering help to patients and families. In some hospitals, palliative care teams of nurses, doctors, social workers and others will visit a patient in the hospital. In some communities, palliative care experts and health professional teams will visit a person at home. There are also volunteer hospice organizations across the country that can provide support and assistance for people at home. The exact type of service available from place to place is apt to vary. Not all communities will offer the same services, and what is available may not be widely publicized. Patients and families may have to ask about which services are available in their community.
The health care professionals and volunteer visitors involved in this work are trained in helping the person who is dying feel supported and cared for. However, not everyone has the same comfort level in talking about
