“…However, leading palliative care researchers and practitioners assert that a single paradigmatic perspective is unlikely to capture the diverse and disparate range of topics relevant to hospice palliative care and call for both greater diversity of paradigmatic perspectives and greater creativity in study design and methods~Phillips, 1992; Macdonald, 1993;Byock, 1994;van Manen, 1997;Corner, 1998; Special Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, 2000!. Moreover, they emphasize a need for research designs that elucidate greater understanding about existential and spiritual concerns of persons at the end of life and methods that are congruent with the basic tenets of hospice palliative care~Macdonald, 1993; Wilkes, 1998! states, we stand on "the brink of the third epoch of healthcare, the epoch of Whole Person Medicine," wherein the wholeness of persons is fully recognized and compels us to look beyond the biology of disease to the broader considerations that underlie human suffering.…”