Palliative Medicine: Both Aid and Threat to Dying Well

Lunch provided at NOONTalk begins at 12:15 pmPalliative medicine does much to create the conditions necessary for patients to live well in the face of death, but palliative medicine can also frustrate and undermine the possibility of dying well. In order to achieve the former while avoiding the latter, Dr. Curlin will suggest that palliative medicine should understand itself as a discipline of medicine, subject to medicine's traditional goals and limits, rather than as a rival form of professionalized care with more expansive goals. On January 1, Farr Curlin joined the Trent Center faculty. He also serves as a Duke Palliative Care clinician. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, he was associate professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, University of Chicago and co-director of the Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago, where he worked with colleagues from the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and the University of Chicago Divinity School to foster scholarship and discourse regarding the intersection of religion, ethics, and the practice of medicine.