Has the embrace of evidence-based medicine caused palliative care to lose its soul?

Background: Recent publications have suggested that palliative care may be detracting from its primary goal of providing holistic care by focusing almost entirely upon measurable clinical and scientific parameters, and neglecting psychosocial research. This paper aims to evaluate whether palliative care has indeed lost its way. Methods: We employ the example of growing calls for the adoption of Relational Autonomy in the Singaporean end-of-life care setting, and the proffering of the Ring Theory of Personhood to explore the effects of the adoption of evidence-based approaches on palliative care. Results: Evidence-based approaches of refuting efforts to employ Relational Autonomy within Confucian-led communities highlights not only the importance of the fusion of traditional empirical and psychosocial studies, but affirms the fact that palliative care continues to espouse a holistic approach. Conclusions: Evidence seems to suggest that the embrace of evidence-based medicine does not detract from the holistic nature of palliative care. Citation: Wei Sim S, Krishna Lalit Kumar R (2015) Has the embrace of evidence-based medicine caused palliative care to lose its soul? Advances in Medical Ethics 2:1. doi:10.12715/ame.2015.2.1 Received: March 2, 2015; Accepted: June 16, 2015; Published: July 5, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Wei Sim. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * Email: [email protected]