Palliative care inpatient service in a comprehensive cancer center: clinical and financial outcomes.

Purpose: Inpatient palliative care units are unavailable in most cancer centers and tertiary hospitals. The purpose of this article is to review the outcomes of the first 344 admissions to the Palliative Care Inpatient Service (PCIS) at our comprehensive cancer center.

Patients And Methods: We retrospectively reviewed our computerized database for clinical and demographic information, length of stay, and hospital billing during the first year of the service's operation.

Symptom masquerade: understanding the meaning of symptoms.

Goals: Somatization refers to patients who transform distress and global suffering into pain and symptom expression. We have observed the opposite phenomenon in some outpatients seen for palliative care: patients who transform pain nociception into global suffering or other symptoms. The goal of this study is to describe the meaning of these patients' experiences that are not expressed as pain but seem to masquerade as other symptoms.