NEW YORK (AP) — Most patients getting chemotherapy for incurable lung or colon cancers mistakenly believe that the treatment can cure them rather than just buy them some more time or ease their symptoms, a major study suggests. Researchers say doctors either are not being honest enough with patients or people are in denial that they have a terminal disease.
The study highlights the problem of overtreatment at the end of life — futile care that simply prolongs dying. It's one reason that one quarter of all Medicare spending occurs in the last year of life.
For cancers that have spread beyond the lung or colon, chemo can add weeks or months and may ease a patient's symptoms, but usually is not a cure. This doesn't mean that patients shouldn't have it, only that they should understand what it can and cannot do, cancer experts say.
Often, they do not. Dr. Jane C. Weeks at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and researchers at several other Boston-area universities and hospitals led a study of nearly 1,200 such patients around the country. All had been diagnosed four months earlier with widely spread cancers and had received chemo.
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