Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures, and the Patient with a Serious Illness, 6th Ed

Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures, and the Patient with a Serious Illness, Sixth Edition is a guide to help patients and families with end- of-life decisions. Millions of families have been helped and comforted by the common sense and practical advice found in these pages. Hank Dunn draws on his extensive experience as a chaplain in a nursing home, hospice program, and hospital. In Hard Choices for Loving People he shares stories of many of the patients and families he has helped guide through this most difficult time. Living with a life-threatening illness presents challenges and difficulties few can imagine, or even think about. Family members are confronted with making extraordinarily difficult decisions, often in the midst of emotionally-draining circumstances. The book is also based on research, offering reliable, relevant medical advice from top medical journals and experts. In the very first pages, the reader is encouraged to first consider the goals of medical care. What is the appropriate medical goal for this patient at this phase of life? Is it to (1) cure, (2) stabilize functioning or to (3) prepare for a comfortable and dignified death? The first chapter deals with CPR, resuscitation attempts. Research has shown that this treatment offers little if any medical benefit to patients who have more than one or two serious medical problems, who cannot live independently, or those who are in the final stages of a terminal disease. Chaplain Dunn is convinced that patients in those conditions or their families choose ineffective resuscitation attempts for emotional and spiritual reasons, not because the treatment offers hope of saving the life. The second chapter addresses the issues surrounding artificial feeding tubes. Receiving nutrition and hydration through a tube may help patients who have lost the ability to swallow. Some of these patients live otherwise normal lives except ...