| Acknowledgments | |
| Sect. I | Roles for Allied Health Care Professionals | |
| Ch. 1 | The Emergence of the Home Health Aide as a Vital Link to the Dying Patient | 1 |
| Ch. 2 | Psychosocial Support Needs of Older Women Caregivers and Older Women Living Alone: Implications for Allied Health Professionals | 21 |
| Ch. 3 | Social Support and the Life-Threatened Patient: Principles of Care for Allied Health Personnel | 31 |
| Ch. 4 | The Role of the Paraprofessional in the Management of Life-Threatening Psychiatric Illness | 39 |
| Ch. 5 | The Institutionalized Anthropologist: How Ethnography Can Contribute to an Understanding of Nursing Home Culture | 45 |
| Sect. II | Issues in Training of Allied Health Care Professionals | |
| Ch. 6 | Clinical Reasoning and the Patient with Life-Threatening Illness: The Role of the Curriculum | 61 |
| Ch. 7 | Nutrition: A Vital but Neglected Component in the Allied Health Care Curriculum | 73 |
| Ch. 8 | Allied Health Professionals, Self-Help Groups, and Life-Threatening Illness: A Holy Alliance | 85 |
| Ch. 9 | Life-Threatening Illness in the "Old-Old" Population: A Challenge in Need of a Response | 95 |
| Ch. 10 | Learning to Care: What Home Health Aides Can Teach Us | 111 |
| Sect. III | Values, Ethics, and Quality of Life in Allied Health Care | |
| Ch. 11 | Thanatopsis: Between Nihilism and Frivolity, or Religion as an Allied Health Discipline | 119 |
| Ch. 12 | Practicing the Art of Uncertainty: Allied Health Professionals and the World of Metaphor | 133 |
| Ch. 13 | Quality of Life: Reality or Rhetoric? | 157 |
| Ch. 14 | Poems | |
| I Still Live | 169 |
| So Long | 171 |
| Ch. 15 | We Laugh to Keep from Crying: Coping Through Humor | 173 |
| Ch. 16 | The Physician as Caregiver | 181 |