You’ve been thinking about your end of life care and have taken measures about your decisions. You’ve read the articles, spoken with family and friends about your options and set up an Advanced Health Care Directive (living will), Advance Health…

Medicare Hospice Benefit, Medicaid Hospice Benefit, and most private insurers pay for hospice care. If you find yourself entering hospice but don’t have any of these coverages, hospice can work with you and your family to ensure that the services you…

Dr. Karen Wyatt, M.D., a hospice physician and death awareness advocate, has seen patients in a variety of settings including hospice, nursing homes, and hospitals – and though the level of physical comfort may vary depending upon the care, the…

When something life-changing like terminal illness occurs in someone’s life, directly or indirectly, we don’t always know why it’s happening to us. Instead of stressing over that, what becomes more important and can offer more help in our healing —spiritually…

Pain can take on several different dimensions including physiological (the actual physical sensation and the person’s accompanying response), cognitive (patients who might anticipate pain based on memories of when they had pain in the past), and emotional. Hospice is about…

Music Therapy, also known as Expressive Therapy, is one of two types of complementary and alternative medicine that have shown to be beneficial for hospice patients for pain control and reducing agitation, depression, and improving their overall quality of life.…

Whether you’re a caregiver or a health care practitioner, the importance of holding space for the person who’s dying is enormously important. It allows the patient to be able to spend their remaining time in a level of quality end-of-life…

Scenes from a loved one’s final days can be moving and meaningful. Several professional photographers have been expanding their portfolios of weddings, graduations, and other larger family events to include end-of-life photography for terminal patients. One example is Shannon MacFarlane…

It’s normal for a hospice to release a small portion of patients before death – about 15% has been typical, but research from some new for-profit companies showed the rate of patients leaving hospice care alive is double that level…

In addition to the physical, spiritual, and emotional effects of dealing with a terminal illness, there’s also the barrage of outside stressors – things like medical bills, insurance claims, and the logistics of taking care of healthy children while still…