I wrote yesterday of the passing of Dame Cecily, the founder of modern hospice. Today, I find a beautiful article by Wesley J. Smith about the purpose of hospice as envisioned by Dame Cecily. Click here to read the article.

Dame Cicely Saunders has died in the hospice she founded.

Dame Cicely Saunders, who died yesterday aged 87, was regarded as the mother of the modern hospice movement; at St Christopher’s Hospice, Sydenham, south London, founded in 1967, she charted new approaches in techniques for treatment of the terminally ill, based on her Christian belief that no human life, no matter how wretched, should be denied dignity and love.

–snip–

Cicely Saunders first had the idea of creating a modern hospice in 1948, when she was working as a lady almoner (medical social worker) at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. There she met David Tasma, a young Polish waiter who, having escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, was dying of cancer, in great pain, on a ward she was visiting.

Though he had little English, they spent their time together talking about death and the care of the dying: “He needed to make his peace with the God of his fathers, and the time to sort out who he was,” she recalled. “We discussed the idea of somewhere that could have helped him to do this better than a busy hospital ward.”

Cicely Saunders fell deeply in love and, when he died, he left her all he had - £500 - and told her: “I’ll be a window in your home.” “It was as though God was tapping me on the shoulder and telling me ‘You’ve got to get on with it’,” she recalled.

Carrying Tasma’s memory with her, Cicely Saunders became a physician and went on to found St Christopher’s Hospice, where she hoped to “help the dying to live until they die and their families to live on”. She had no new drugs, but showed how, by using them earlier in anticipation of, rather than in response to, the onset of pain, terminally ill patients could be kept comfortable until the end.

What a great lady. We owe her a debt of gratititude. (HT Wesley J. Smith)

Back last November, I wrote about rumblings in Florida to require criminal background checks on prospective resident. In Illinois, they’ve apparently passed such a law and are now about to suffer the consequences:

Emergency rules implementing the recently signed legislation require all 100,000 current nursing home residents to undergo a criminal background check and be checked against sex offender databases maintained by the Illinois State Police and the Illinois Department of Corrections. The same requirements apply to new admissions.

–snip–

A spokeswoman for a statewide nursing home association said the new rules are going to turn a delicate family decision into a gut-wrenching experience.
“It’s difficult enough to decide to put an elderly relative in a nursing home,” said Pat Comstock of the Illinois Health Care Association. “But then to have your elderly grandmother or grandfather subjected to a criminal background check is even more difficult.”

And then there is this:

Although the State Police and DOC databases can be easily checked from any computer equipped with Internet access, requests for criminal background checks submitted electronically to the State Police can take up to three days and cost $10. If submitted manually on paper, they can take up to a few weeks and cost $16, according to State Police spokesman Rick Hector.

More than 50 percent of new admissions to nursing homes come directly from hospitals, Comstock said. (emphasis added)

Do you think those hospitals will keep the patients for the days (or weeks) it will take to do this check?

The Washington Post is reporting that a new study may have identified a protein linked to memory loss:

Some recovery of memory may be possible in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, suggests a provocative new study in mice that could help researchers open a two-pronged attack against the mind-robbing illness.
The research shows a mutant protein named tau is poisoning brain cells, and that blocking its production may allow some of those sick neurons to recover. It worked in demented mice who, to the scientists’ surprise, fairly rapidly regained memory.
The work is years away from being useful in people. There are no drugs yet to block tau, and most of the recent search for Alzheimer’s treatments has focused instead on another protein, called beta-amyloid.

–snip–

It’s important research because it bolsters the notion of targeting those sick neurons in hopes of one day reversing at least some of dementia’s damage, said William Thies, scientific director of the Alzheimer’s Association. Today’s Alzheimer’s drugs only treat symptoms.
“If you can actually rescue some of these sick cells, that really brings the possibility of return of some function, which would be of tremendous value,” he said.

Read the whole thing.