02 June, 2006
Associated Press
Doctors Say Futile Cancer Treatment Rising
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE , 06.02.2006, 07:35 PM

Doctors are reporting a disturbing rise in the number of cancer patients getting chemo and other aggressive but futile treatment in the last days of their lives.

Critics of the practice say doctors should be concentrating instead on helping these patients die with dignity and in comfort, perhaps in a hospice.

Nearly 12 percent of cancer patients who died in 1999 received chemotherapy in the last two weeks of life, a large review of Medicare records revealed. That is up from nearly 10 percent in 1993, and the percentage probably is even higher today, researchers said.

“Patients don’t like to give up,” and neither do physicians, said Dr. Roy Herbst, a cancer specialist at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who had no role in the study.

Overly aggressive treatment gives false hope and puts people through grueling and costly ordeals when there is no chance of a cure, cancer specialists said.

“There is a time to stop,” said Dr. Craig Earle of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. “It’s sometimes easier to just keep giving chemotherapy than to have a frank discussion about hospice and palliative care.”

Earle led the federally funded study and presented the findings Friday at a meeting in Atlanta of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. . . . .

However, another study presented at the cancer meeting on Friday showed the opposite problem: people not getting enough care.

A survey of nearly 700 primary care doctors in Wisconsin found that only 11 percent would refer a patient with advanced lung cancer to a cancer specialist and only 25 percent would refer a woman with advanced breast cancer.

“We also found a general lack of knowledge about the benefits of newer treatments” that can help such patients, said Dr. Timothy Wassenaar of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who reported on the study at the cancer meeting.

“That’s horrible,” Herbst said of the unwillingness to refer such patients. He noted that newer chemotherapy treatments have extended lung cancer survival from 20 percent at one year to nearly 50 percent now.

Full story:
Doctors Say Futile Cancer Treatment Rising — Forbes.com