by: Eric Widera ( @ewidera ) The word "palliative" is popping up in a lot of unexpected places of late. Sometimes its used in combination with the word "care" but not in the traditional way we think of usual palliative care practice. One just has to go back to Alex Smith’s post of a recent JAMA study on “palliative care” meetings in the ICU or Elizabeth Lindenberger's wonderful post in Pallimed about the same study. Let’s just say that the term palliative care is used loosely in the discussion section of the manuscript and newspaper articles written about this study. Another great example is brought to us by Drew Rosielle’s post in Pallimed on the term “Palliative Sedation” : “Besides the ridiculously confusing nature of the phrase 'palliative sedation,' it's another example of the myriad ways in which 'palliative' is used: care-which-is-palliative, care-which-is-given-by-a-palliative-care-team, palliative pediatric cardiac