Palliative medicine - Psychological therapy [Palliativmedizin - Psychologische therapie]

Patients with progressive cancer and their families face a series of existential crises with each stage of disease up to terminal stages in which palliative treatment is begun, and patients come to accept the inevitability of death. This can lead to a unique, highly emotional situation with direct or indirect, open or hidden, varied and very personal manifestations. In these situations, physicians and other health professionals must not let themselves be paralyzed by the nearness of death or be seduced into overactivity, but rather must be competent and honest partners for the affected patients. The necessity of maintaining a high medical and oncological standard on the one hand, and of fulfilling complex psychosocial requirements on the other, makes working in palliative medicine a personal challenge that well deserves the name of 'holistic medicine'.