“DON'T LET ME DIE FROM HUNGER”: NUTRITIONISTS AND (NON) FEEDING PATIENTS IN PALLIATIVE CARE IN LIFE TERMINALITY SITUATIONS
food; nutritionists; palliative care; death.
Palliative Care (CP) corresponds to an approach that promotes quality of life for patients and their families, in the face of a disease that threatens life. Food is part of this care, and it is recommended for advanced disease to offer comfort and pleasure. In food and nutritional care in CP , it is also possible to not feed the patient in specific situations, a conduct fraught with discussions. In order to understand how nutritionists deal with the (non) food and nutrition of their patients in CP in situations of terminal life, we conducted a qualitative research with 7 nu-tricionistas who deal with this situation in practice. We use narrative interviews and workshops with projective scenes as methodological tools. The interpretative analysis was anchored in Gadamerian Hermeneutics. In the dialogue with the narratives, we identified that death in personal life is considered natural, but charged with suffering, and death in the professional routine transitions between feeling of powerlessness and the redefinition of the role of care, being still absent in the training of nutritionists. The meanings of food speak of the promotion of care and respect for the patient's food history; the concept of CP shows the promotion of quality of life until the proximity of death, minimizing discomfort and understanding the role of food in addition to recovery, including pleasure, comfort and loving care. The challenges of food and nutritional care before the end are many and are expressed in the limits of the protocols, in the quest to guarantee the quality of life for the patient and in the exhaustion of therapeutic strategies of nutritional and nutritional conduct. On the other hand, in view of the proximity of death, spirituality appears as a means of coping, as well as the possibility of offering comfort until the end enhances the discovery that it is possible to take care without feeding.