Futile treatment is on the rise

Some don’t know when to give up:

“Patients don’t like to give up,” and neither do physicians, said Dr. Roy Herbst, a cancer specialist at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who had no role in the study.

Overly aggressive treatment gives false hope and puts people through grueling and costly ordeals when there is no chance of a cure, cancer specialists said.

“There is a time to stop,” said Dr. Craig Earle of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. “It’s sometimes easier to just keep giving chemotherapy than to have a frank discussion about hospice and palliative care.”

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