What’s the difference between hospice and palliative care?

Question

I’ve seen palliative care described as symptom-relieving treatment *usually* for terminal diseases, though it doesn’t have to **only** apply to terminal diseases. Doesn’t that make pretty much ALL medical treatment “palliative care”? Say if someone has epilepsy and they are treated with anti-seizure medicine to stop their seizures, would that fall under the definition of palliative care?

In: 8

Answer 1

To your epilepsy example… not really. Palliative care is much more specific to treating the pain and secondary symptoms that come from curative treatment of a serious illness… so if you are undergoing chemo for cancer, for example, and are struggling with low appetite from that chemo, the palliative care provider would be brought in to help with increasing appetite.