Palliative care helps patients and their families deal with challenges linked to serious illnesses by making life better. This type of medical care works on easing symptoms and involves:
- Spotting illnesses and related issues
- Careful and precise evaluation of health conditions
- Addressing pain as well as physical, emotional, and spiritual struggles
Its goal is to reduce pain, handle symptoms, and lower the strain of long-term illnesses while striving to make life better for both the patient and their loved ones.
A lot of folks confuse palliative care with hospice care. Hospice provides support for people in the last phases of an illness. Palliative care, though, works differently. It helps individuals of any age dealing with serious illnesses. Its main purpose is to reduce symptoms, and it can go hand-in-hand with treating the actual disease.
At KIMS Hospitals, Electronic City palliative care begins while the patient is still in the hospital. A team of specialists works with the patients, their loved ones, and hospital staff to solve any unique problems or concerns they might have. A board-certified palliative care doctors lead this care service. The team includes a nurse specialising in palliative care, a psychologist who focuses on counselling social workers in the medical field and at times doctors from various specialities. They also partner with other professionals when needed such as a dietitian, physiotherapist or a speech and swallowing expert, along with other support services.
Why You Should Go for Palliative Care?
If you or your loved ones are facing any serious illness you may feel both confused and overwhelmed. The right support can ease your worries, make things clearer for you and bring a sense of calmness in you that you are on the right track. This is where palliative care helps:
- Relief from hard symptoms such as pain, trouble breathing, fatigue, nausea, constipation, loss of appetite, and difficulty sleeping.
- Improved ability to manage daily tasks while focusing on living well.
- Added support in managing medical treatments for both patients and caregivers.
- Alternative treatment options like yoga, music therapy, or aromatherapy.
- A better understanding of your illness and available care choices.
- Emotional or spiritual support to help patients and families.
Who Should Get Palliative Care?
Age is not a criterion for palliative care. Also for any health condition, you can get palliative care, whether or not your doctor is actively treating your illness. Doctors offer palliative care to individuals dealing with various medical problems. These problems can include conditions like:
- Cancer: Palliative care helps ease pain, fatigue, nausea, and emotional challenges during every stage of cancer treatment.
- Stroke: Our Palliative care department helps both patients and families in improving life quality by managing pain, symptoms, and emotional stress that comes with the long treatment. Our experts also assist with making decisions, setting recovery goals and planning to handle end-of-life care when recovery cannot happen.
- Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Care focuses on managing ALS symptoms like muscle weakness, breathing difficulties, and communication challenges that worsen over time.
- Alzheimer’s disease: Our Palliative care department supports patients and caregivers in handling behavioural changes and making plans as memory and other cognitive functions decline.
- Heart disease: It helps people with ongoing heart problems manage chest pain, feeling short of breath and being worn out.
- HIV and AIDS: If you or your loved ones have these conditions we are here for you to manage your physical struggles, mental well-being and treatment side effects.
- Kidney disease: Palliative care experts make you feel more comfortable. Their main goal is to reduce your kidney symptoms, help pick the right treatments and focus on quality of life if you are having long-term or serious kidney issues.
- Liver disease: If you have liver disease we work on decreasing the intensity of symptoms like pain, exhaustion, itching or confusion.
- Lung diseases like COPD and emphysema: The main goal of care is to ease breathing troubles and reduce stress, along with tackling other ongoing symptoms of lung conditions.
- Multiple sclerosis (MS): This type of care focuses on easing pain and muscle stiffness, managing fatigue and helping with memory or thinking problems to make daily life easier.
- Parkinson's disease: Care aims to handle symptoms, support mobility, and address mental health needs as the illness progresses.
- Stroke: It works to relieve pain, improve speech and movement problems, and offer emotional support as individuals heal or adjust after a stroke.
Easing Symptoms
Palliative care helps reduce symptoms that trouble your body, mind, or feelings. The care team may assist you or guide you on how to improve your comfort in everyday life.
If you have symptoms like those mentioned below palliative care can help you:
- Pain or discomfort: Your doctor may give you medicines or simple interventions like nerve blocks, steroid injections, or trigger point injections to reduce the scale of pain you are experiencing
- Anxiety: Relaxation techniques, therapy, or medication help people feel less tense or worried.
- Constipation: Eating certain foods, keeping an active lifestyle, or taking laxatives helps with easier bowel movements.
- Depression: If you have therapy, medication or counselling you can experience improvement in feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
- Fatigue: Conserve your energy during the day, eat nutritious meals and practice light exercises or aids that control breathing. All these measures can manage your tiredness.
- Loss of appetite: To make you eat better, our experts help you to boost your appetite, tweak your meals accordingly or manage feelings of nausea if it is there.
- Nausea: Medications or diet changes can help control nausea and prevent throwing up.
- Shortness of breath: Oxygen, specific breathing exercises or certain medicines can improve breathing.
- Stress: Practising mindfulness, speaking to counsellors or turning to spiritual care eases mental strain.
- Trouble sleeping: Building healthy sleep habits, adding calming routines, or using medication can make it easier to rest better.
Methods We Use
Your palliative care team may use these approaches to reduce symptoms:
- Breathing exercises: These techniques help reduce breathlessness and bring calmness.
- Cognitive exercises: Sharpen memory, improve focus and clear your mind while helping you feel more balanced.
- Exercise guidance: Simple and custom movements to build strength, raise energy levels, and brighten your mood.
- Medication prescriptions: Medications prescribed to address pain, nausea, trouble sleeping, anxiety, or other concerning symptoms.
- Relaxation exercises: Techniques like muscle relaxation or guided imagery may calm your body and mind.
- Sleep improvement tips: Ideas like avoiding screens for at least 2 hours before bed and keeping a steady bedtime schedule can help improve your sleep quality.
Pain Control Services
At KIMS Hospitals Electronic city our Pain Management Service works to ease pain caused by surgery, injury or sudden illness.
We combine traditional treatments with newer techniques such as continuous peripheral local anaesthetic catheters to provide better pain relief to those in need.
The pain management team works as a unit to support patients facing serious pain challenges. They use techniques like PCA, epidural catheters and local anaesthetic catheters to treat acute pain.
Patients who find it difficult to control their pain in the hospital can connect with a pain management specialist. A doctor can request a consultation with the pain team at any moment. Both nurses and patients can also contact the pain management nurse practitioner if managing pain on their own becomes tough.
Pain management has become an expanding area in medicine providing various strategies and tools to help those who face acute or long-term pain.
Advancements in medical studies and a better understanding of how pain influences individuals have led to improvements in pain care.
Acute or Chronic Pain
Acute pain can feel sharp or intense. It might be mild sometimes, but other times it can be much worse. This kind of pain can show up and then disappear or it might stay for a bit longer. It often serves as a signal to warn about a problem inside the body like a fracture or a burn. Fixing the issue or letting it recover makes the pain stop.
Chronic pain refers to pain that lasts over 3 months and sticks around even when injuries are better. It may show up with signs like stiff muscles or fatigue and sometimes brings emotional challenges like frustration or anxiety. Conditions like arthritis, migraines or lower back problems are common reasons for chronic pain. In some cases, chronic pain results from damaged nerves creating sensations like burning, stabbing, or prickling. People often feel tingling and numbness too. Cancer is another major cause making it important to manage symptoms to handle daily life.
Some folks are more sensitive to pain, while others might feel pain from mental health struggles like depression.
Managing pain holds significant importance in addressing various medical conditions. Patients dealing with severe discomfort caused by cancer or its treatments often need a well-thought-out strategy to manage it. Those recovering from major surgeries or serious injuries as well as individuals experiencing chronic pain in their backs or joints, understand the value of targeted pain management. Focusing on pain care not only helps speed up recovery but also enhances their overall outcomes.
Options to Manage Pain
If you are having pain, your doctor will always look for a way that will work best for you in managing pain. Some popular options include:
- Medication: Most commonly used, you can get relief from pain with the help of painkillers or creams and gels that you apply to the skin. When the pain gets worse, doctors may suggest stronger treatments like morphine, codeine, or even antidepressants, anticonvulsants, or muscle relaxers.
- Minimally Invasive Pain Intervention (MIPSI): Doctors inject a mix of medicines into the problem area or nerve under USG or C-Arm guidance. This method lowers pain, decreases swelling or eases nerve irritation.
- Electrical nerve stimulation: This method helps stop or dull pain signals and can also minimise swelling, nerve irritation, or muscle spasms.
- Surgery: Patients can avoid surgery in many cases since doctors often treat painful conditions using non-surgical methods. However, these treatments might not work as well over time. When intense pain does not get better with other approaches, surgery might be necessary to address the root cause.
- Physiotherapy: Exercises focused on stretching and building strength help increase flexibility and physical endurance. Our physical rehabilitation specialists will create a customised plan for you that will make you achieve the best possible results.
- Alternative treatments: Sometimes, managing pain might include the help of additional techniques like acupuncture, trigger point injections, deep massages, relaxation techniques, TENS, biofeedback or hydrotherapy as part of a broader treatment strategy.
- Counselling: Speaking with a counsellor or psychologist can help you manage feelings like anger or sadness. These emotions may make pain harder to handle or lead to depression.
How We Diagnose and Examine Pain
To manage acute or chronic pain, the first step involves diagnosing it correctly. At KIMS Hospitals, Electronic City, our pain management experts review your clinical history and conduct your physical check-up.
They also perform various examinations to identify the root cause of your pain and rule out other possible issues.
Here are the types of tests we use:
- CT scan: A combination of X-rays and computer technology produces detailed images of the body's internal sections.
- MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging uses a strong magnet, radio signals, and a computer to capture body images without using X-rays.
- Diagnostic nerve block: Identifying pain sources can be challenging when it's unclear. Nerve blocks help pinpoint specific pain sources, find what adds to it, and develop a solid treatment plan.
- Myelogram: Similar to a discography, doctors inject a contrast dye into the spinal canal. This test is often done with an X-ray to get a clearer look.
- EMG: Doctors perform this test to measure how muscles react when the brain, spinal cord, or nearby nerves send signals.
- Bone scans: These scans help doctors find and track bone problems like infections, fractures or other bone disorders.
- Ultrasound imaging: It uses high-frequency sound waves to produce images of tissues and internal organs.