Early palliative care for lung cancer: improving quality of life and increasing survival

A major barrier to broader public acceptance of palliative care for life-threatening illnesses has been the reasonable presumption that forgoing aggressive treatment in favour of palliative care would necessarily result in a shortened lifespan. Patients and treatment providers alike felt that they were confronting a stark choice between improving quality of life at the expense of quantity of life, or extending quantity of life, but at the expense of quality of life. In contrast, many hospice and palliative care providers believed that patients might live longer if symptoms were managed and every effort was made to maintain quality of life. In this commentary, we focus on our recent high-profile publication that directly addresses these issues (Temel et al, 2010).