Palliative care: science and protection at the end of life

In the context of contemporary medicine, sub-merged in a kind of technological imperative that dominates daily clinical practice, the mod-ern hospice movement is emerging within pallia-tive care. The movement is emerging in an ethos based on compassion and care for patients and their families, seen as a unit, in an active search for measures to relieve the anguishing symptoms – especially pain – and thus relieve suffering, while facing death as part of the natural process of life history rather than as an enemy in battle. Curiously, in the age of high biotechnology, a mo-dality of care for persons that are dying proves to be an interdisciplinary intervention with a revo-lutionary thrust: a hasty look fails to capture the dimension of palliative care, a health field praxis that combines scientific knowledge, bioethical interpellation, and sensitivity in the face of hu-man suffering