The Institute for Advanced Radiation Oncology

Disease Site Specific Treatment

Symptom Management

When cancer treatment is provided to relieve symptoms, rather than cure disease, it’s called palliative care. For patients with metastatic or advanced disease, the three major branches of cancer therapy — surgery, radiation oncology, and medical oncology — play significant roles in the palliation of symptoms by decreasing pain and improving quality of life.

Palliative radiotherapy — in its various external and internal forms and in conjunction with surgical and medical interventions — may help people live more comfortably in several important ways:

• Reducing the need for pain-relief medications that produce troublesome symptoms and side effects.
• Alleviating pain in patients whose cancer has spread to bone, particularly those at risk for developing fractures in weight-bearing structures, such as a hip or the spine.
• Extending the potential of survival for certain patients whose cancer has spread to the brain.
• Decreasing the debilitating neurological symptoms of spinal cord compression caused by metastatic cancer.
• Relieving the extremely severe complications associated with superior vena cava syndrome, which develops as a result of lung cancer or lymphoma growth.

For more information on Monmouth Medical Center’s Palliative Care and Pain Program, click here. Additional information on the palliative cancer care also is available from the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society.

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