Author Description

At its core, Supportive Care and Palliative Care is designed to minimize suffering in patients due to their illness or the treatment of their illness. This suffering can manifest in the physical, psychological, and spiritual realms. Additionally, most cancer patients have pre-existing co-morbidities that can exacerbate and complicate the treatment of their sources of suffering.Children require different assessment and communication strategies and strong participation by parents and primary clinicians in their care. Much has changed since the last edition of the Supportive and Palliative Care Handbook. Like cancer, COVID's devastating effects did not just impact those individuals who became infected but also their families, entire healthcare systems, and the dedicated healthcare providers who continued to uphold their oath to provide comfort to the infirm during the greatest public health care crisis in generations. And like cancer, COVID's effects are not limited to the physical. This new edition has chapters that address some of consequences and residual effects of the COVID pandemic - the precipitous rise of non-medical opioid use, the accelerated shift to a virtual clinical environment via telemedicine, and the epidemic of burnout amongst healthcare workers.Over many editions, the Supportive and Palliative Care handbook has served as a practical bedside tool to assist clinicians in the daily care of their patients. In addition to the new chapters mentioned above, the 7th edition continues to reflect recently acquired knowledge on assessing the major physical and psychosocial symptoms and new pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions that our department has adopted to deliver the best supportive care and palliative care. Our handbook is not intended to provide a scholarly review of each subject. Therefore, we have tried to keep all chapters short, clinically oriented, and with a limited number of references. We hope this information will help all our c