Regarding the hospice thread and the OP deleting all posts not agreeing with him/her

I'll post my last response on the hospice thread which was of course again deleted like the others and say this regarding hospice......

Hospice as I stated over and over should not make death come any more quickly. Home medications should never be discontinued unless requested by the patient or family. Hydration and Nutrition should never be denied to anyone.
Overmedication with things like morphine and lorazepam should never happen. And most certainly those meds should not be administered without the symptoms that warrant their administration. Like I said before as a hospice nurse I say strongly that these things should never happen. As healthcare workers we should all be patient advocates but of course sometimes this doesn't happen d/t either lack of education or just shitty care. And when it doesn't happen the people like OP and the others who hate hospice so much for "killing your relative" should be their advocates. I'm so sorry for your experiences but If you felt like someone was killing your family member you should be their final advocate if no one else will be. Maybe you have guilt because you stood by and watched these things happen without standing up and demanding hydration, nutrition, medications, or hospitalization. Afterall these patients were not in jail and held against their will. There is always the choice to be on hospice or not be on hospice. To go to the hospital or not. Even to join hospice and then sign off of hospice. All of these pointing fingers at healthcare workers should also look at themselves for just watching it happen. Maybe all of this hate is related to feelings related to guilt for not doing more for their family member. With appropriate Hospice care none of these things talked about in the thread should've happened. Shame on you for not standing up for your family member. I know if I saw these things happening to my family member I would've made sure that a different route was taken...

So anyways here's my last post that got deleted from the thread and again it's so sad that so many people had such horrible experiences with hospice care. It should not be this way at all.

You keep telling everyone to Google Hospice Kills. Of course you'll get related results when you google such a thing just like any other opinion related topic.

Also hospice nurses don't medicate patients so they cannot eat or drink. As a matter of fact, hospice nurses (RN case manager) usually see patients only once a week or at most once a day depending on the patients condition and don't medicate the patients at all. Typically family members are the ones medicating patients unless of course there is an LVN or something staying around the clock with a patients and if they're medicating a patient to put them in a coma and make them unable to eat or drink then they are wrong and not following the oath they took as a nurse.

Generally, The morphine and lorazepam are to be given for symptom treatment. Not to induce a coma. Anyone who medicates a patient who does not have symptoms that require such medications is wrong and either needs to find a different job or in the families case, need more education.

This whole inducing dehydration thing that you talk about over and over again is silly. I don't know how all of the other companies do it but like I said even when a patient cannot eat or drink we would offer IV fluid/SC fluid hydration or even a feeding tube which like I said most of the time the patient couldn't process the fluids anyways but sometimes it did help them and like I said it was always an option and should always be an option for any hospice patient.

One thing repeatedly left out is the variety of hospice patients. The level of their illness. Some still drive, walk, talk,dance others do not. The patient dying of Cancer vs Cardiomyopathy vs Liver Failure vs Dementia and in all the different stages are all totally different patients and have totally different declines and treatment plans but all have the same options available when it comes to the necessity of home meds and hydration and nutrition and hospitalization and. No patient should ever be starved to death or forced into dehydration d/t overmedication or denied any other treatment options that were available before hospice.

I admire your passion in trying to protect people from something that you obviously feel strongly about and I hope you have good intentions but I think that your opinion is based on a limited understanding of hospice, the dying process, the physical body and various disease processes or maybe on just a few cases or even a few thousand cases as you say that you have read about or heard about. Just like you scream that you hate it based off of what you've read I can scream that I was a part of the lives of many as they went through the process and it was not at all like what you're describing. I'm sorry for whatever has triggered your issue with this but I hope that at some point you are able to slow down and explore the positive experiences that people had with hospice care. I know that there are many cases of people with bad experiences but hospice is not the problem and to single out an entire field based on people problems is not right.

My aunt just recently passed away from Lung Cancer after doing chemo and radiation in hopes of becoming cancer free just a few months after being diagnosed. Before that she was a perfectly healthy woman without a single medical problem. The chemotherapy and radiation killed her. And it was a horrible death to watch. Now granted I personally am not a fan of chemo and radiation most of the time because I've seen what it does to so many I will not go so far as to say that the doctors who order it and the nurses who administer it are murderers. Nor will I say that the people who choose it are playing God because they chose it. My step mom became cancer free after her chemo and radiation and I wouldn't dare tell anyone that they shouldn't choose those treatments based on my own personal feelings about it.

Of course hospice is different because the result is always death but it is not supposed to make the death happen any faster than without hospice. If that is repeatedly happening then someone is doing something wrong.