Spicy
Time to Move On From The Buckets
The delivery models our best researchers are building don't use the binary. They use tiers, triggers, defaults, dose-response logic, and precision targeting.
Changing the World
One step at a time.
Meaning
The Taxonomy Is Lagging the Trials
A continuum framework doesn't abandon non-specialist training. It specifies it: which competencies, for which clinicians, at which moments, with what infrastructure.
Changing the World
Palliative Care’s Real Power Skill Is Systems Translation
Palliative care must keep the bullshit filter intact, and stop letting our most consequential work get filed under "support." That is systems translation: converting symptoms, values, family dynamics, prognostic reality, and institutional constraints into care plans the system can actually execute.
Changing the World
The Room You Can't Curate
I have to make an argument, hear a counterargument, lose a vote, and then sit next to the person who beat me at dinner. And then come back the next morning and do it again.
Changing the World
You Will Not Be the Person Who Filled Out That Form
What if the reason ACP underdelivers isn't that we do too little of it, but that we've misunderstood what it's for? The answer lives in an unlikely place for a clinical field: behavioral economics.
Hows & Whys
AI Won't De-Skill Palliative Care
The de-skilling threat is real and asymmetric across specialties. Palliative care sits on the protected side of that asymmetry—because the highest-value things we do are the things machines are worst at.
Communication Skills
Teams, Not Saviors: Protecting Each Other from Compassion’s Edge States
Every team thinks they’re compassionate. Fewer can name the cliffs embedded in compassion—and fewer still can stop one another from going over the edge in the middle of a messy consult.
Health Policy
Hospice Caregiver Burden and the Systematic Delegitimization of Care
💡Start with Rachel Cohen Booth's excellent article in Vox, What happens when a city takes women’s unpaid work seriously? It catalyzed my thoughts below. Hospice prides itself on dignity at the end of life. But what about dignity for those doing the hardest work—unpaid caregivers? If
Changing the World
Death, Creativity, and Compassion: What Are We Really Training For?
In specialist palliative care, we talk about “compassion training” as if it’s a discrete skill you can add to a checklist. Joan Halifax’s enactive model challenges that notion: compassion isn’t a module; it emerges when attentional clarity, affective balance, ethical intention, and embodied engagement cohere in context.
Changing the World
Augmented Intelligence in Palliative Care—Redesigning Care Delivery
Dr. Whyte's right—and in palliative care, the stakes are even higher.
Changing the World
Compassion on Clearance: Why Palliative Values Always Seem to End Up Out of Stock
If you’ve ever wondered why working in healthcare, especially in Specialist Palliative Care, feels like its being pulverized by grinding gears, this essay is for you.
Changing the World
The Monster We Built—and How Palliative Care Can Slay It
Let’s stop pretending that our health system is anything other than a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from billing codes, productivity metrics, and cultural myths about heroism in medicine.