Moribund obesity as a palliative care diagnosis.

摘要

Dear Editor:The science of medicine includes the palliation of poorly understood symptoms and their etio-pathogenesis; it frequently culminates in the palliation of symptoms when there is nothing more to offer as cures for the incompletely understood and poorly controlled disease. Let me offer two noncancer examples. First, the cause of idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension is poorly understood. Treatment strategies targeting the intimal and medial smooth muscle proliferation of precapillaries in pulmonary vasculature are still not available. Hence, at present, the management of the disease is limited to the palliation of the hypoxic and nonhypoxic pulmonary va-soconstriction and its consequent hypoxemia.