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Palliative care was first designed as a set of in-hospital interventions to ease discomfort of dying patients. In 2010, a single important study went a long way toward fundamentally changing its role and establishing that, in the right circumstances, palliative care and regular medical care are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive (JW Gen Med Sep 30 2010).
In a randomized trial from a single Boston hospital, 151 patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non-small cell lung cancer were provided with either standard oncologic care plus palliative care from diagnosis until death or oncologic care only. Compared with recipients of oncologic care only, palliative care recipients reported significantly better quality of life during t…