Indications
Patients at all stages of treatment need some kind of palliative care to comfort them. In some cases, medical specialty professional organizations recommend that patients and physicians respond to an illness only with palliative care and not with a therapy directed at the disease. The following items are indications named by the American Society of Clinical Oncology as characteristics of a patient who should receive palliative care but not any cancer-directed therapy.
- patient has low performance status, corresponding with limited ability to care for oneself
- patient received no benefit from prior evidence-based treatments
- patient is ineligible to participate in any appropriate clinical trial
- the physician sees no strong evidence that treatment would be effective
These characteristics may be generally applicable to other disease conditions besides cancer.
Read more about this topic: Palliative Care
Famous quotes containing the word indications:
“The indications are that swearing preceded the development of cursing. That is, expletives, maledictions, exclamations, and imprecations of the immediately explosive or vituperative kind preceded the speechmaking and later rituals involved in the deliberate apportioning of the fate of an enemy. Swearing of the former variety is from the lips only, but the latter is from the heart. Damn it! is not that same as Damn you!”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence; to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger; and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)