How Cancer Centers Lie About the Definition of Palliative Care

Executive Summary

• Palliative care has a specific and accurate definition.
• When cancer centers found that this definition reduced their ability to sell treatment, they began writing articles to try to muddy the water on what palliative care is.

Introduction

Cancer centers and oncologists make a great deal of money from palliative care. However, how palliative care is presented makes it sound like it is all benefit and not cost. In this article, we discuss these costs.

Why Not Try Immunotherapy if the Patient is Dying Anyway?

As is covered in the NTY article ‘Desperation Oncology’: When Patients Are Dying, Some Cancer Doctors Turn to Immunotherapy Immunotherapy is often used at the end stage of cancer as a type of “Hail Mary.”

Dr. Oliver Sartor has a provocative question for patients who are running out of time.

Most are dying of prostate cancer. They have tried every standard treatment, to no avail. New immunotherapy drugs, which can work miracles against a few types of cancer, are not known to work for this kind.

Still, Dr. Sartor, assistant dean for oncology at Tulane Medical School, asks a diplomatic version of this: Do you want to try an immunotherapy drug before you die?

The chance such a drug will help is vanishingly small — but not zero. “Under rules of desperation oncology, you engage in a different kind of oncology than the rational guideline thought,” Dr. Sartor said.

What is entirely left out of this explanation is that cancer treatments are both costly and come with very negative adverse effects.

Notice in this quote; there is no concept of cost/benefit.

Admitting Many Times Cancer Treatments Are Worse Than the Cancer

The infrequency of admission by the cancer center that treatment should be stopped.

“We have to balance between hope and reality,” he said. “The most difficult conversation we have with patients is when we have to tell them that more treatment is actually hurting them more than the cancer.”

This is an interesting quote because it is unheard of for this to be admitted on the websites that cover cancer treatments.