Some Developmental Aspects of Palliative Medicine in Russia

The development of traditional radical medicine, with its principles of extending the quantitative parameters of life at all costs, has embraced fresh ideas about palliative medicine, which has oriented physicians to a humane attitude toward the problems of incurable and doomed patients. The "quality of life" slogan concerning those whose days are numbered sounded for the first time in the 1970s, but few people know the history of the relevant priorities. At that time, the ideas of palliative medicine, which have found their incarnation in the hospice movement that has spread throughout the world, including Russia, penetrated far beyond the framework of oncology. In the early 1990s, the World Health Organization set the task of investigating the quality of life throughout the world community. Reappraisal of values, taking into account psychological, social, and spiritual needs from the position of individual perceptions of life, has become a problem that civilized countries have undertaken to solve.