Cancer – Palliative Treatments

Transcript

So when you first get a diagnosis with cancer, one of the first things that they’re going to talk about is what is the goal or the way that they’re going to attack this cancer. And by that, I mean, what’s the overall plan. So there are a few terms that you’re going to hear, and they are: neoadjuvant, adjuvant, definitive, and palliative treatment. And they all mean different things. Palliative means that this is an incurable cancer, and that we’re going to give you treatments that will hopefully keep you around months to years with very little disease, if any, cause it can be effective and it can make the cancer almost disappear to where you have a very normal quality of life. But the cancer was never technically cured. That’s palliative treatment, but it does not mean that the cancer just keeps growing. It just means that it’s technically incurable. Now, some people on some medications like immune therapy, some people can go years sometimes without the disease coming back. And we just kind of keep watching but it’s still considered palliative cause statistically we’re not at a place where we can call it being cured.