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Robert McCann, MD

JAMA. 1999;282:1380-1381.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Food plays important biological, social, religious, and symbolic roles in our society. From a mother breastfeeding her infant to a grandmother serving a meal, the provision of nutrition is a common way to demonstrate love and affection. Given these important roles of food, great concern arises when a person loses the ability to eat, a characteristic that often accompanies the dying process. During this time of great distress, families turn to familiar ways of providing comfort and expressing love, and the inability to provide food can be very unsettling.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that not eating may be one of the many facets of the dying process and not the cause. Abnormal swallowing is often a marker for severe, multisystem illness and carries a high mortality regardless of intervention with artificial feeding.¹ Although our society has come to expect that cancer is . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Department of Medicine, Highland Hospital/University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.

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