Palliative sedation to alleviate existential suffering at end-of-life: Insight into a controversial practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All terminally ill individuals should have access to palliative care that gives equal importance to all aspects of suffering. In spite of all the efforts made, some of these individuals will, unfortunately, be left with suffering described as "refractory". It would appear that palliative sedation then becomes an option. There is much controversy around this practice, especially when it is used to alleviate suffering of a more existential nature. This article aims first to define the practice of palliative sedation, second to explore the concept of existential suffering in palliative care and third to address the implications for nursing practice.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".