Intuition: two caregivers' descriptions of how they provide severely demented patients with loving care.

To understand how caregivers reason when faced with patients in late states of dementia, two recognized expert caregivers were interviewed about their experiences of caring for severely demented patients. Combined in the precontext were hermeneutic, psychodynamic, and existentialist perspectives with regard to theories of human development and care ethics. Ethical reasoning, exemplified by tender descriptions of relatedness to patients, indicated that expert caregivers use sound knowledge combined with imagination, empathy, and intuition, to reach a total grasp of the situation, where the patient is regarded as a person with worth, dignity, and integrity.