ief from distressö (McDonnell, 1986, p. 34). Palliative care is seen by medical and ethical experts as the appropriate response when a cure is no longer possible and should be designed ôso that the patient can live and relate to others as normally as possible [and] should neither hasten nor postpone deathö (McDonnell, 1986, p. 34). The issue of palliative care is especially important to the nurse because she (or he) is the health-care professional providing the most hands-on care, and will therefore in many cases be the one that the patient will turn to for information about what palliative measures are possible (Ray, 1997, p. 17).
One of the issues important in addressing the treatment of pain in the dying seems almost absurd from the outside but is in fact a serious one: Often doctors have worried about giving the most effective pain relievers to patients because of possible toxicity, possible side effects or û and this is the absurd part û possible addiction. While it does seem absurd for a doctor to withhold morphine from a cancer patient who has a few weeks to live on the grounds that the person might become addicted, such instances do occur, and it has been one of the foci of the hospice movement to remove such doubts from the minds of physicians (Danto in DeBellis etal, 1992, p. 305).
It is indeed surprising that physicians should be so concerned about going too far in relieving pain, for the relief of pain is one of the practices that makes medicine so important in a society. All of us know that human bodies ar
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