The Nature of Suffering and its Relief in the Terminally Ill: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essential mandate of medicine is the relief of suffering. However, the quest for an integrated model towards a conceptualization of suffering is still ongoing and empirical studies are few. Qualitative inquiry using 31 in-depth interviews and content analysis was carried out between 1999 and 2001 in 26 patients diagnosed with terminal cancer. The suffering experience was described through a multiplicity of heterogenous elements from the physical, psychological, and social spheres. Systematic synthesis of interview material yielded three apparently irreducible core dimensions. Respondents defined their suffering in terms of 1) being subjected to violence, 2) being deprived and/or overwhelmed, and 3) living in apprehension. Cassell wrote, in 1991, that to know the suffering of others demands an exhaustive understanding of what makes them the individuals they are (1). Our model can be of use in structuring and eliciting this necessary information. Understanding how a particular patient feels harmed, deprived or overburdened, and overtaken by fear, provides a lever for action tailored to the specifics of that person's experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".