Memorial Sloan-Kettering researchers have found that people in the late stages of cancer might benefit from meaning-centered psychotherapy, a treatment aimed at helping people sustain a sense of meaning and purpose.
While the main goal of medicine is to cure or control disease, there is an increasing need for attention and resources to be directed to addressing issues such as pain and symptom relief — conditions directly related to a patient’s quality of life during treatment. More than twenty-five years ago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was the first cancer hospital to create a pain and palliative care service. Today, the service continues to work to relieve, or palliate, the pain and distress that may be experienced by cancer patients — both those in active, curative treatment and those with advanced, late-stage cancers.
Clinical psychologist Allison Applebaum commented on a study that found that spiritual patients who reported high levels of support from their religious communities were more likely to receive aggressive end-of-life treatment.
Paul Glare, MD, Chief of the Pain and Palliative Care Service, was interviewed about an editorial he wrote to accompany a study published in the British Medical Journal that found a new scoring system might be able to tell patients in the final stages of cancer how much time they have left so they can prepare for their passing. Dr. Glare was also quoted in the Huffington Post.
