Practical Palliative Care: Evidence-Based Symptom Management, Pain Control, and Goals-of-Care Communication for Dyspnea, Nausea, and Delirium in Serio (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798187490653)

A complete working reference for the symptoms, conversations, and decisions that define palliative practice.

Serious illness rarely presents one problem at a time. A patient with advanced heart failure is breathless at rest, nauseated from a new medication, and confused overnight. The family wants to talk about what happens next. Every one of those threads needs an answer, and most of them need it today.

Practical Palliative Care is built for that reality. Across 51 chapters, it moves from the philosophy and public health foundations of the field through detailed symptom management, team-based care delivery, disease-specific chapters, and the emergencies and ethical questions that arrive without warning.

What is inside:

• Symptom assessment and management in depth. Pain assessment and pharmacologic management, adjuvant analgesia and interventional techniques, breathlessness, fatigue, nausea and vomiting, gastroparesis, constipation, bowel obstruction, cachexia, mucositis, wounds and lymphedema, delirium, psychiatric symptoms, and the last days of life.
• The conversations that carry the most weight. Breaking difficult news, advance care planning and shared decision-making, prognostication, spirituality and dignity, and sexuality and intimacy.
• Care across every setting. Home and primary care, hospital and acute inpatient, the ICU, residential and aged-care, and rural practice, along with the roles of generalists, specialists, nurses, caregivers, and volunteers.
• Condition-specific guidance. Cancer, heart failure, COPD and interstitial lung disease, neurodegenerative disease and stroke, dementia, kidney, liver, and endocrine disease, multimorbidity, frailty in older people, pediatric palliative care, and intellectual disability along with cultural and Indigenous perspectives.
• Emergencies and ethics. Metabolic, hematologic, structural, neurologic, psychiatric, and social emergencies, plus ethical frameworks, palliative sedation, assisted dying, and contested decisions.
• Four quick-reference appendices. Symptom management, palliative care emergencies, assessment tools and frameworks, and ethical and decision-making frameworks, along with a glossary, abbreviations list, and full index.

Who it is for:

• Palliative medicine physicians, fellows, and residents
• Hospice and palliative care nurses and nurse practitioners
• Oncologists, intensivists, geriatricians, and internists
• Clinical pharmacists and physician assistants
• Social workers, chaplains, and allied health team members
• Students preparing for palliative and hospice care rotations

Chapters are written to be read on their own. Look up delirium at 2 a.m. without needing the chapter before it. Read the goals-of-care chapter before a family meeting. Use the appendices when there is no time to read anything longer.

Palliative care is not what happens when treatment stops. It is what happens alongside it, and it deserves the same rigor as any other specialty. This book treats it that way.