If palliative care was a drug, one question we would want to know before prescribing it is what dose we should give.  Give too little - it may not work.  Give too much, it may cause harm (even if the higher dose had no significant side effects, it would require patients to take a lot of unnecessary additional pills as well as increase the cost.)

So, what is the effective dose of palliative care? On today’s podcast, we talk about finding an evidence-based answer to this dosing question with three leaders in palliative care: Jennifer Temel, Chris Jones, and Pallavi Kumar.  All three of our guests were co-authors of a randomized control trial on “Stepped Palliative Care” published in JAMA this year.

We talk about what stepped palliative care is, how it is different from usual care or intensive palliative care, why these palliative care dosing questions are important, and dive deep into the results of their trial.  We also discuss some of the other important trials in palliative care, including Jennifer Temel’s landmark NEJM study on outpatient palliative care and another study that gave an intervention we dubbed “fast-food palliative care” in an older GeriPal blog post.

** NOTE: To claim CME credit for this episode, click here **