This insightful and moving article argues for wider use of palliative care in end-of-life situations. Written from her personal experience with terminal patients, the author notes how, ironically, a focus on positivity can deny the much-needed comfort that palliative care provides. Contrasting a rural southern hospital and a top urban neurorehabilitation facility, she notes how her patients received more end-of-life comfort in the former. She calls for physical therapists to “advocate for better integration of palliative care principles into PT practice.”

Physical therapy has been practiced in the US for more than 100 years. But have rehabilitative services been the same for all Americans? These authors show how Black, Brown, and Indigenous People have not fully reaped the rewards of this, or any, aspect of the US healthcare system. They state that the nation’s “structural racism” continues to shape “exclusion of racialized persons from all levels of physical therapy.” They offer this article as a “first step in better understanding this history”—and in finding real solutions.