Medicine near the end of life, where goals change.
10 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
On Death and Dying
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross · 1969
Argues, from interviews with dying patients, that dying follows a recognisable psychological sequence — denial, anger, bargaining, depression,…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS): A Simple Method for the Assessment of Palliative Care Patients
Bruera et al. · 1991
Proposes that patients themselves should rate nine common symptoms on a simple numeric scale at every visit, arguing that routine self-report catches…
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Serial Cultivation of Human Diploid Cell Strains
Leonard Hayflick & Paul S. Moorhead · 1961
Shows that normal human cells divide only a finite number of times in culture before senescing, arguing against the prevailing view that cells are…
+6 more at this level
12 works
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Argues, from interviews with dying patients, that dying follows a recognisable psychological sequence — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and that clinicians who ignore it fail their patients at the end of life.
World Health Organization
Treats falls in older age as a preventable public health problem with identifiable risk factors, not an inevitable consequence of ageing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Health Organization
Argues that palliative care is a basic health-system function, not a specialist add-on, and sets out how to build it into primary and hospital care at any resource level.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Health Organization
Reviews the evidence for physical activity, diet, cognitive training, smoking cessation and management of vascular risk factors, arguing that a substantial share of dementia risk is modifiable even though no intervention yet prevents it outright.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bruera et al.
Proposes that patients themselves should rate nine common symptoms on a simple numeric scale at every visit, arguing that routine self-report catches distress that clinician observation alone misses and makes symptom control trackable over time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Leonard Hayflick & Paul S. Moorhead
Shows that normal human cells divide only a finite number of times in culture before senescing, arguing against the prevailing view that cells are intrinsically immortal and establishing a cellular limit now understood to underlie ageing.
Beers et al.
Constructs the first explicit, consensus-derived list of medications whose risk in older adults outweighs their benefit, arguing that inappropriate prescribing can be identified against criteria rather than left to individual judgement.
SUPPORT Principal Investigators
Finds that better prognostic information and a dedicated nurse facilitator failed to change how aggressively dying patients were treated, showing that poor end-of-life communication resists a purely informational fix.
Linda P. Fried et al.
Defines frailty as a measurable clinical syndrome — unintentional weight loss, exhaustion, weakness, slow walking speed and low activity — distinct from disability or ageing alone.
Ellis et al.
Pools randomised trials of comprehensive geriatric assessment in hospitalised older adults and argues that a structured, multidisciplinary assessment on admission — not just good individual clinical care — increases the odds of a patient living independently at home afterward.
link checked 17 Sept 2026O'Mahony et al.
Provides an explicit, physiology-based list of medications to stop and start in older patients, arguing that inappropriate prescribing in the elderly is systematic and predictable enough to be screened for at the bedside rather than left to individual clinical judgement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gill Livingston et al.
Argues that around 40% of dementia cases are attributable to twelve modifiable risk factors across the life course, making dementia substantially a prevention problem rather than only a treatment one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026