Talk:Terminal illness

palliative care

The explanation that palliative care is normally offered to all patients is too simplified. Palliative care is may include treatments not normally offered to all patients. Eg, pain relief that incurs a high physiological cost: morphine and radiation come to mind. --Una Smith (talk) 04:45, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. Does my recent change address this concern (adequately, or even at all)? I'd be happy to hear any other thoughts about this article.

I think there is some diversity of opinion regarding the proper metes and bounds of palliative care. The main article on that topic, for example, claims that the term applies to "any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than providing a cure," which could include minor interventions (like giving paracetamol to an influenza patient to reduce a fever). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:41, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Inheritance of Hope

I don't really see the point in linking to Inheritance of Hope. It's a super-tiny non-profit organization that happens to have chosen terminal illnesses as its focus. It is literally one of thousands of non-profits around the world with this focus. (Every hospice and palliative care organization, for example.) What's so special about this one, that it should be listed in this article when none of the others are? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Terminal Illness

There is NO legal definition of this term at all: the Department of Works and Pension use a different estimated survival time to the Institute of Insurers. Whether a patient is 'terminally ill' or not is exclusively determined by their NHS Consultant - and if he/she has a long waiting list, and the patient is elderly or disabled, the scope for unblocking beds by 'upstaging the imminence condition' is enormous. The practice is widespread.

The link you gave in your article defines Terminal Illness thus:

A condition that is 'reasonably expected' to result in the death of the patient within a relatively short period of time, whether medical treatment is received or not. Often an arbitrary six-month period is used by third-party payers and care providers in order to ration or appropriately utilize scarce resources. In the presence of terminal illness, palliative care may include the treatment of physical changes secondary to the declining medical condition, at times employing the same therapies that in other instances are used for curative purposes (for example, shrinking a tumor with radiation in order to slow its growth, where the radiation will not cure the patient). Some studies show that individuals with a terminal illness prefer their doctors and other care providers to think of them first and foremost as persons who are living with a life threatening condition, rather than as dying patients.

79.77.10.61 (talk) 04:26, 21 March 2010 (UTC)DrLofthouse79.77.10.61 (talk) 04:26, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

As a new contributor, I may be commenting in the wrong place -- please forgive errors if so. I have concerns about using 'cancer', or any category of diseases that includes non-terminal variants, or variants that are by degrees treatable or curable, as a general example of terminal illness. With an accurate and well operationalized definition of terminal illness, examples in text do not seem necessary and could be very misleading. CatV71.09 (talk) 03:34, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

NCI source

This:

• National Cancer Institute. "End-of-Life Care: Questions and Answers" 2010-02-09.

is an acceptable source, but it doesn't say anything about 100% of patients readily accepting a terminal diagnosis, or that depression is transient, or anything about stages of grief. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Educational Assignment

Hello, my name is Travis Freetly and I am working on an

by editing the terminal illness page. I would like any feedback you can give on my edit, and I apologize for the large amount of editing. This is how my class at Clemson University is set up, with large amounts of words change and additions being required. Thanks