Glossary: Integrative End-of-Life Care

Palliative Care

Palliative care focuses on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of serious illness. Through addressing physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns palliative are aims to improve the quality of life for both patients and their families and may be integrated with curative treatments.

Palliative Care

This medical specialty is often associated with hospice; however, it can also be used independently and alongside curative treatments. Palliative care is available in every state, appropriate for anyone at any stage of life suffering with a debilitating illness–terminal or not–and focuses on pain management and providing comfort (Deathwithdignity, 2024).

Passive euthanasia

Hastening death by withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging or sustaining medical treatments, such as feeding tubes, ventilators, or drugs, with the expectation that death will occur sooner rather than later (The Hastings Center et al., 2023).

Peristalsis

Peristalsis is the involuntary circular and longitudinal muscles movement that moves food through your gastrointestinal tract.

Photobiomodulation

Photobiomodulation is a non-invasive therapeutic technique using specific wavelengths of light, usually in the red or near-infrared spectrum, to stimulate cellular processes and enhance tissue regeneration, promote healing, reduce inflammation, and provide pain relief.

Physician-assisted Dying

The practice of a physician providing the means for mentally competent, adult patients with terminal illness and decision-making capacity, to take his or own life. It permits dying patients to request a prescription for life-ending medications from their physician, usually with a prescription for barbiturates that patient must self-administer and ingest the medication without assistance. This practice is also sometimes also called physician-assisted suicide, Medical Aid-in-Dying (MAiD), physician aid-in-dying, and patient administered hastened death) (The Hastings Center et al., 2023).