- Supportive care for patients with late-stage disease.
- Often underutilized/delayed
- Note: Palliative care is NOT hospice care though it includes hospice care.

Palliative Care (not hospice care)

- Supportive care focuses on alleviating symptoms and improving the quality of life in patients with life-threatening chronic diseases. As a (good) side effect, this sometimes improves survival rates.
- As shown below, palliative care is supportive care for patients with late-stage disease, and hospice care is palliative care for patients near/at the end of life.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Treatment resistance
- Types of treatment (e.g., surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy)
- Treatment approaches/aspects (e.g., palliative care, precision medicine)
- Other treatments (e.g., hyperthermia, complementary medicine)

Cancer Treatment

Hui, D., & Bruera, E. (2016). Integrating palliative care into the trajectory of cancer care. Nature reviews. Clinical oncology, 13(3), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2015.201

Integrating palliative care into the trajectory of cancer care | Nature Reviews | Clinical Oncology 

- "Staging is the process of finding out how much cancer is in a person’s body and where it’s located" (cancer.org).
- Staging is important in determining what treatments are necessary and the patient's prognosis (though the cancer stage isn't the only factor).

The children of this node will focus on:
- TNM Staging
- Other staging systems 
- When is cancer staged (clinical stage, surgical stage, post-therapy stage)
- Assigning overall stage (tends to be from Stage I to IV)

Cancer Stages

Supportive Care

Surgery, radiotherapy, cytotoxic chemotherapy, molecularly targed therapy, and immunotherapy are the pillars of cancer care.

Cancer | Standard Treatments & Pillars of Cancer Care

Treatment Resistance in Cancer

- Traditional Approach
- Pallative Care (focuses on managing symptoms)
- Precision or Personalized Medicine
- Off-label Drug Use
- Biosimilar drugs
- Clinical Trials
- Complementary and Alternative Medicine

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Related

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