Transpersonal medicine and spirituality in end of life cancer care

Transpersonal medicine is a new approach to medicine that use a new paradigm and also non-ordinary states of consciousness and peak experiences. Transpersonal means to go over the boundary, beyond the personal level including the spiritual or transpersonal dimension. End of life care is a special field where sufferance is extreme and verbal approach is limited or ineffective or inapplicable. The experience of death is dramatic for patients, familiars and sanitary, involving all aspects of life. Special care should be offered to the dying person, prioritizing, recapitulating, reorienting towards new meanings, especially about transcendence needs. The classic Maslow need pyramid, in hospice cancer patients, is completely inverted, when symptoms are adequately controlled. The death preparation is complex and needs a specific preparation of the therapist, who has to access non-ordinary states of consciousness and peak experiences, to drive patient by resonance and empathy in the uncertainty of death. A clinical case is described. In conclusions verbal interventions are frequently inapplicable in dying patients and transpersonal medicine, in non-ordinary state of consciousness, are useful. Treatment with specific transpersonal intervention allows patients to approach death with better quality of death and to live quietly the experience of dying.