Palliative Care

The challenges of serious and terminal illnesses can be overwhelming. Palliative care offers compassion, understanding, and expertise to treat the physical, spiritual, and emotional symptoms patients may experience so they may live life to the fullest extent possible. Palliative care typically combines medical skill with attention to the emotional as well as spiritual needs of patients. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the Church’s support for the seriously ill and encouraged the promotion of policies to create conditions where individuals may bear illness and the end of life in a dignified manner. The Holy Father said, “it is necessary to stress once again the need for more palliative care centres which provide integral care, offering the sick the human assistance and spiritual accompaniment they need. This is a right belonging to every human being, one which we all must be committed to defend.”
~ Message of His Holiness Benedict XVI for the Fifteenth World Day of the Sick, December 8, 2006.

Testimony:

SB 259 Establishing a Palliative Care Center for Health Care Consumers and Providers and Continually Appropriating a Special Fund - January 22, 2014

Read more about it:

“Killing the Pain not the Patient: Palliative Care vs Assisted Suicide,” by Richard M. Doerflinger and Carlos F. Gomez, M.D., Ph.D.