Harvard Health Letters: Palliative care: Underused therapy yields surprising benefits: The word palliate is derived from the Latin word for a cloak or coverlet. Perhaps that's one reason many people, both health care professionals and their patients, assume its goal is to simply mask or cover up symptoms when a remedy or cure is unavailable. But reducing discomfort and suffering is very different from and much more important than merely hiding distress from view -- and palliative care can go hand-in-hand with curative care and life-extending therapies.
Curative care focuses on the disease, while palliative care focuses on the patient. Modern palliative care strives to relieve physical and emotional suffering and to enhance the quality of life for patients and their families. It's a team effort.
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