Suffering in heart failure Individu

Suffering in heart failure Individuals with heart failure may experience various forms of suffering that go beyond physical discomfort. Suffering has been described as a personal and subjective assignment of an intensely negative meaning to a perceived threat to personal integrity and the sense of self, and a disintegration or lack of wholeness and harmony. As such, suffering is perceived as existing in two behavioral states with the patient moving back and forth between these two states. One state is enduring, in which emotions are manifested by emotionlessness. The other state is that of suffering, in which emotions are released and overt distress is manifest. Suffering includes physical, psychological, social and spiritual domains. For the purpose of this paper, suffering is broadly conceptualized as both physical and non-physical suffering. Non-physical suffering is characterized by loss of meaning, purpose, connectedness, and a sense of hopelessness (Fig. 2). Despite its association with end-of-life phenomena, suffering has not been extensively studied in patients with heart failure. A possible reason for this gap in our understanding may include the unpredictable clinical trajectory of heart failure, which often results in patients dying before they are deemed eligible for palliative or hospice care. This limited predictability of heart failure-related outcomes may contribute to unrelieved suffering in this population. Suffering from advanced heart failure involves the experience of many physical symptoms. Nordgren and Sorensen found that terminal patients with heart failure experience. symptoms on average in the last months of life. The most common symptoms experienced by terminal patients with heart failure include breathlessness (88%), with pain (75%) and fatigue (69%). Physical pain may be considered an important symptom to be managed, yet approximately 25% of heart failure patients with pain received no treatment for their pain.