Abstract
As a premier provider of continuing education in specialty and primary palliative care, the CSU (California State University) Shiley Institute for Palliative Care is honored to participate as a partner organization of this special issue of the JACM.
The institute was founded in 2012 as a workforce initiative of the CSU system, responding to the need for academically rigorous but also affordable and accessible education in palliative care for health care professionals across the nation, and the globe. Our courses are online, instructor-led, and self-paced, covering core topics in palliative care as well as certificate-level preparation for nurses, chaplains, advanced practice providers, and social workers.
Palliative care starts with the premise that patients are whole persons who experience illness, suffering, coping, and caring in all dimensions of their lives. They experience distress in mind, body, spirit, and relationships, or “total pain,” as the founder of the modern hospice movement, Cicely Saunders, termed it. 1
Physical pain cannot be separated from spiritual, emotional, mental, or relational suffering. A person with cancer not only struggles with nausea, fatigue, hair loss, neuropathy, pain, and more, but also isolation, dependence, fractured identity, altered relationships, and fear. 2 An approach that only addresses one dimension, falls along only a few well-worn paths, or is delivered by only one or two categories of clinician, as advanced allopathic medicine tends to do, is inadequate, even harmful.
Palliative care entails advanced and even aggressive allopathic approaches, to be sure, but it relies on the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team, includes caregivers and patients as coequal partners in the care plan, supports patient autonomy, and prioritizes comfort and quality of life in concert with curative efforts. It also—as the articles in this issue abundantly show—pulls in complementary and integrative interventions to achieve its goals.
Another key underpinning of palliative care is the importance of a proven evidence base. Palliative care and complementary/integrative approaches share more than a foundational philosophy and goals—we also share a relative dearth of empirical support for our interventions and the not-always-unjustified suspicion of our peers. 3 That is why this journal and these articles are so important—peer review and dissemination of studies and results contribute to the validity and reliability of the field.
At the institute, we have made a strong commitment—unique among other programs in palliative care—to promoting complementary and integrative approaches. Our courses include Healing Through Art, Food Is Medicine, Cannabis in Hospice and Palliative Care, and Aromatherapy, which similar to all our offerings are based in science and delivered with professional adult learners in mind. We intend to expand and strengthen this category every year. We hope you will visit our website (