Watching my grandfather slowly die in at-home hospice care, seemingly in great pain--though he was not lucid--was personally radicalizing. The family is told to

Watching my grandfather slowly die in at-home hospice care, seemingly in great pain--though he was not lucid--was personally radicalizing. The family is told to administer pain meds as needed, but if they don't pick up on the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the patient languishes in needless limbo. Literature targeting families reassures them that despite jerking, moaning, and death rattles, their loved ones are not suffering, but hospice providers have very good reasons to want families to believe that. Just now, I found this study that concludes that caregivers are awful at detecting pain in the dying: > Agreement between caregivers' subjective assessments and objective neurophysiological measures of consciousness and pain was very poor. > Conclusions: Caregivers' subjective assessment of level of consciousness and pain during CSD is unreliable compared with objective neurophysiological monitoring. Our results suggest that assessments of patient comfort during CSD could have been improved substantially by including objective monitoring of level of consciousness and pain. [1] In my opinion, it's outrageous that more research and effort is not made to ensure our hospice care is actually effective in giving patients a painless death. Current practices have similar scientific rigor to blood-letting. 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33151515/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33151515/