Abstract

With each patient, especially those with an incurable disease such as dementia, a holistic approach is essential. In recent years, through the development of palliative medicine, medical professionals have been trying to reduce physical pain and psychological suffering in order to improve the patient’s quality of life and to enable a dignified death. The patient’s suffering affects their family members, as well as medical staff - the palliative care professionals. The question is how to help when curative medicine has exhausted all its options with its diagnostic and therapy treatments. Since integral medical care on a physical, psychological, and spiritual level is one of the principles of action in palliative medicine, the best psychotherapeutic method for treating such patients is logotherapy, which considers a person through all these dimensions, with special focus on the spiritual. Logotherapy is successfully used with the patient’s family members, and its principles help palliative care professionals deal with the different challenges of their daily work. Logotherapy is based on the understanding that it is in the human nature to search for meaning while guided by conscience. Logotherapy points at recognizing human fate and freedom and encourages actively exercising that freedom. Even when fate cannot be changed (death, illness), a person is free to choose the attitude they have toward it. Our strongest motivation is to search for meaning outside ourselves, in someone or something, by transcending our “self”. To have a meaningful purpose in life is to have a healthy life.