Death and grief: a Complex Thought point of view

Abstract

The ultimate goal of palliative care is to alleviate the suffering of both the patient and his family, through the proper understanding, detection, and control of physical, psychosocial, and spiritual symptoms experienced by patients at the end of life, regardless of diagnosis. But, while it is true that death is a natural phenomenon, the process of dying is treated as a disease, and today, we are experiencing the medicalization of death. As a consequence, many people die in hospitals in the most extreme loneliness and pain. In other cases, service provision models have been dichotomized to the point of providing aggressive curative treatment and establishing palliative measures in the face of therapeutic failure. The consequence of this reality is that patients and families are left in the middle of an economic and social conflict, since they do not find a team that allows them to understand the nature of the disease, the diagnosis, and the prognosis, this being a crucial aspect for the decision-making at the end of life.