Let ' s Stop Claiming That Palliative Care Improves Survival

by Drew RosielleHospice and palliative care community, I ' m calling for a moratorium on all blanket, unqualified claims that hospice and palliative care improve survival.Let ' s just stop doing this.There has never been any actual evidence that palliative care (PC) interventions improve survival in patients, but since thelandmark Temel NEJM 2010 RCT of early outpatient palliative care for lung cancer patients showed a clinically and statistically significant improvement in longevity in the PC arm, I have heard and all read all sorts of statements by palliative people and all sorts of others (hospital executives, policy makers, oncologists) in all sorts of venues (local talks, national talks, webinars, newspapers, etc) along the lines of ' palliative care helps patients with cancer live longer. ' I ' ve even heard the results discussed as evidence that hospice helps cancer patients live longer.We should have never done this, and if you ' re still doing it, please stop.To begin with, ' palliative care ' isn ' t a single thing. It ' s not like studying enoxaparin, or nivolumab, or olanzapine, where you can to a reasonable extent assume that if it helps patients in Lille, France or Boston, MA, it will likely help your similar patients in your practice wherever. Palliative care is just not like that - it is complex, and local conditions are very important, and it is impossible to make broad generalizations about PC in general from a single study at a single institution. Some...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: lung cancer palliative palliative care quality of life rosielle temel The profession Source Type: blogs