Illness understanding in patients with advanced lung cancer: curse or blessing?

ABSTRACT

Early palliative care (EPC) should be introduced from the start of the treatment of patients with advanced lung cancer. Unfortunately, this is often not integrated in daily oncologic care. This letter wants to emphasize the importance of offering a holistic approach, meaning EPC to optimize quality of life (QoL). Illness understanding is important because patients with better understanding of their disease choose more often for symptom control and less for an aggressive treatment at the end of life. This illness understanding should be achieved during communication with the treating oncologist. Based on the limited available literature about illness understanding, it seems that an EPC program is necessary when breaking bad news, in order to maintain or improve QoL in patients.