Palliative Care Textbook: Evidence-Based Assessment and Management of Suffering Across Serious Illness Populations

Every clinician who cares for seriously ill patients confronts the same challenge: how to relieve suffering that does not respond to disease-directed treatment, how to have conversations that medicine rarely teaches, and how to support patients and families through the most difficult passage of human life. Palliative Care Textbook is the comprehensive clinical reference built for that work.

This textbook delivers authoritative, practical guidance across the full scope of palliative medicine — from opioid pharmacology and symptom management to goals-of-care communication, advance care planning, hospice operations, and clinician resilience. Every chapter is grounded in current guidelines from the National Consensus Project, AAHPM, ASCO, EAPC, NHPCO, and WHO, and reflects evidence through 2025.

Inside this textbook:

• Pain management — opioid pharmacology, equianalgesic dosing, opioid rotation, methadone, adjuvant analgesics, interventional procedures, and bone pain management
• Symptom control — dyspnea, nausea, malignant bowel obstruction, constipation, cachexia, delirium, depression, anxiety, cancer-related fatigue, insomnia, and wound care
• Communication — SPIKES, REMAP, VALUE, family meeting facilitation, prognostic disclosure, and cross-cultural communication
• Ethics and ACP — advance directives, POLST, decisional capacity, surrogate decision-making, palliative sedation, and medical aid in dying
• Psychosocial and spiritual care — demoralization, Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy, Dignity Therapy, caregiver burden, spiritual assessment, and chaplaincy
• Grief and bereavement — grief theories, Prolonged Grief Disorder (DSM-5-TR), Complicated Grief Treatment, and clinician grief
• Disease-specific care — oncology, heart failure, COPD, renal disease, ALS, dementia, liver disease, and frailty
• Pediatric palliative care — neonatal care, developmental pain assessment, concurrent care, and pediatric hospice
• ICU palliative care — ventilator withdrawal, ICU family meetings, palliative sedation, and organ donation
• Hospice operations — Medicare Hospice Benefit, eligibility, levels of care, IDT coordination, and quality metrics
• End-of-life care — recognizing the dying process, final-hour physiology, comfort nursing, and cultural practices
• Clinician wellbeing — burnout, compassion fatigue, moral distress, resilience, and career development

Written for: Palliative care physicians, fellows, hospice medical directors, APPs, oncologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists, nephrologists, neurologists, social workers, chaplains, nurses, and medical students — any clinician who believes that how a patient lives through serious illness, and how they die, matters as much as the diagnosis they carry.

Drug dosing includes route, frequency, duration, and organ-impairment adjustments throughout. Communication frameworks include real clinical language. Every chapter cites current authoritative guidelines by name and edition. This is not a pocket guide, and it is not a theoretical treatise — it is the reference that palliative clinicians actually need at the bedside, in the clinic, and in the ICU.

Palliative care has never been more evidence-based, more urgently needed, or more demanding of the clinicians who practice it.

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