Summary

Integrating cim into oncologic palliative care promises to improve overall health-related quality of life, to provide further relief from distressing symptoms and spiritual suffering, and to bring hope to patients and families facing terminal illness. O’Shaughnessy offers the following somber reflection:

It seems evident that at least one advantage was gained from the use of the remedy—the awful malady was stripped of its horrors; if not less fatal than before, it was reduced to less than the scale of suffering which precedes death from most ordinary diseases…. Next to cure, the physician will perhaps esteem the means which enable him “to strew the path to the tomb with flowers,” and to divest of its specific terrors the most dreadful malady to which mankind is exposed.