No single person should make decisions about for whom or according to which criteria palliative surgery is clinically and ethically appropriate.

Hospital lawyers’ practices shape risk management operations, influence clinicians’ morale, and affect patient care.

A patient’s transition from “living” to “dying” is not socially marked in the same way death is marked, and this is both clinically and ethically relevant.

Defining typical appearance as a goal of health service provision is harmful and unnecessary for traits that are stigmatized but neither harmful nor distressing.

This commentary on a case considers moral reasons to adopt a palliative approach to the care of some psychiatric patients.

Futility can function as a moral counterweight to a duty to treat, helping clinicians  find balance between over- and undertreatment. 

Palliative psychiatry can facilitate compassionate resolution of ethical conflicts in end-of-life care decision making with persons with substance use disorders.  

The concept of mortal time is useful for exploring how hospice care frameworks might help nonhospice clinicians find calm in practice.

Guidance about sedation to unconsciousness and medically ineffective interventions can be applied to surgical palliation.