Palliative Care – The Future of Anesthesia

00:00 So, we're going to talk a little bit now about the future. Palliative Care is the care of patients who are dying. It's the process by which we try to assist people during that period of time. Both them and their families. We try to help them manage their pain. Manage their depression. Manage their immobility. Anesthesiologists up until very recently were not involved in Palliative Care, but the work that we do in chronic pain has now shifted us over into palliative care as well. And anesthesiologists are now training in palliative care as one of the subspecialties they can enter once they finished their regular anesthesia training. The ability to produce patient controlled analgesia, epidural analgesia, spinal cord stimulation, has improved the experience for Palliative Care patients. We now have ultrasound guided regional blocks, and we can block nerves that are damaged or are causing areas of pain that is really uncontrollable in any other way. And there's an increased emphasis on trying to get away from using opiate based drugs in Palliative Care patients, and using drugs that don't have as much central nervous system effect, so that patients remain clearheaded and are able to describe their wishes clearly to the medical team and the nursing team.