In your clinical experience, you may have cared for patients receiving palliative chemotherapy and wondered, hmmm, why is that called “palliative” chemotherapy? We’ve written about this issue previously here at GeriPal (“a term that should be laid to rest”) as has Pallimed (“an oxymoron”).

Well, now we have “palliative” inotropes for people with heart failure.  And we have to ask, is this a fitting term?  And the answer is...complex...more so than you might think.  Recall that in one of our earliest podcasts, we talked with Nate Goldstein who memorably proclaimed “the best palliative care for heart failure is treatment for heart failure.”  

To unpack the issue of palliative inotropes, we welcome back Haider Warraich, a cardiologist with a strong interest in palliative care.  We are joined again by Anne Rohlfing, palliative care fellow at UCSF who spent last year as a hospitalist on the heart failure service. 

Please tune in to hear more about the role of palliative care in inotrope therapy, inotropes in hospice, Haider’s study on palliative needs of patients with heart failure, and a bit about Left Ventricular Assist Devices (including a shout out to Dan Matlock’s decision aids) and Haider’s Journal of Palliative Medicine paper on top 10 tips for palliative care clinicians on caring for patients with LVADs.

-@AlexSmithMD