Les soins palliatifs, vers une éthique de l'hospitalité ?

Palliative care is the return of what is repressed for a technical medicine. They questions a medical practice which always finds its identity more in technical efficiency. Without denying the requirement of competent medical staff, do we have for all that to conclude that competence is only declined in the register of the mastery of technical means? As a mater of fact for a medical practice according to which “doing anything possible is necessarily good” a growing distance is created between the therapeutic gesture and the curing one. As if medicine should not take care but curing. However, does palliative care not find again the gesture of hospitality beyond the great power of technical means when technical helplessness is established? In short, does palliative care not cure a medicine which suffers from its hyper technicity? Putting palliative care under the seal of hospitality ethics tends to show that distinction between curative care and palliative one is fallacious. Palliative care invites not to get confused between the means of taking care and the care itself.