Walther Cancer Institute Palliative treatment and care is generally defined as a shift away from therapy aimed at cure towards comfort and management of symptoms and side effects of the disease to promote quality of life. However, curative and palliative treatments are not easily separated.
Curative treatments can be very effective even as patients approach the end of life.
This fact indicates that simple knowledge of treatments, even in the presence of site and stage of cancer, may not reveal the goal of the therapy and, indeed, that goal may not be explicit either to the physician of the patient and family. Clearly late stage disease either at initial diagnosis or at recurrence will increase the probability that palliative care may be the short or longer-term goal of treatment. Often, however, depending upon availability or physician awareness, patients with late stage disease will first be put on a treatment protocol. Not uncommonly, there may be more than one such protocol and for those who are fortunate, regression may occur. However, other patients will fail the protocol and tumor progression occurs and they will be started on possibly a second protocol, the goal of which is more palliative than curative.