What is palliative treatment and when should it be used?
Palliative treatment means treatment that is designed to relieve symptoms, and improve your quality of life, rather than cure an illness. It can be used at any stage of an illness if there are troubling symptoms, such as pain or sickness. In advanced cancer, palliative treatment may help someone to live longer and to live comfortably, even if they cannot be cured. Palliative treatment can also mean using medicines to reduce or control the side effects of cancer treatments. Palliative treatment does not just mean painkillers and anti-sickness drugs. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormone therapy, biological therapy and surgery can all be used as palliative treatments. For example, surgery may be used to relieve a blocked bowel. The surgeon will remove as much of the cancer as necessary to relieve the blockage, even if the cancer has spread to another body organ, such as the liver. The operation can relieve severe nausea and vomiting, and may give the person with cancer more time feeling we
