Dr. Barbara A. Olevitch

Articles in the media are recommending a certain kind of “conversation." In an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2010, Michael Vitez describes in detail how a palliative care team brought a family into a comfortable living room for repeated discussions about their mother who had been hospitalized for confusion and falling. Over and over again, they were offered the choice of discontinuing her “aggressive" medical care, but the family held out. They continued her medical treatment.