Minimal Comfort Feeding Is a New, Controversial Approach in Late Dementia (opens in new tab)

By the time Linda Lawson was in her late 60s, she had advanced dementia, could utter only a string of unintelligible sounds and had lost the ability to feed herself. To keep her alive, her care team fed her three times a day. At times, she bowed her head and pushed herself away from the table. Her family didn’t like seeing her force-fed. Her primary care doctor suggested “minimal comfort feeding,” in which providers offer just enough food and liquid to ensure comfort, and only when the patien...