Impact of Sedation in Palliative Care

Palliative medicine has grown by leaps and bounds in the new millennium. With the increasing acknowledgement of ‘Palliative care’, new and more exciting studies on Palliative Care are happening. Palliative care is an approach that provides relief to patients and their families that are facing problems related to life-threatening illness. Palliative Sedation is when intentional sedation is used under this care to relieve a dying patient from his/her intolerable suffering from refractory symptoms. Here we debate the importance of Palliative care and Palliative sedation, consider the risks involved, the ethical dilemmas faced while deliberating upon how to improve the services provided under palliative care. We have looked into the various studies that have been conducted and tried to sketch out an outline of the different protocols and definitions regarding palliative care. The risks associated with Palliative care to induce Continuous Deep Sedation (CDS) have also been noted. Studies have always suggested that euthanasia and palliative care by definition are antagonistic, but new studies force us to rethink this approach and think of euthanasia as just another option that should be available to the patient. But no matter what, the patient should always receive palliative care at the highest level.