Oncologists overtreat patients at end of life: “There’s a real deficit in our training”

Oncologists overtreat patients at end of life: “There’s a real deficit in our training”
Oncology News Central; by Nathan I. Cherny, Robert A. Figlin; 1/29/25
When it comes to end-of-life care for patients with cancer, “I think that there is a real deficit in our training,” says Nathan I. Cherny, MD, director of the Cancer Pain and Palliative Medicine Unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Cherney and colleagues recently examined factors contributing to oncologists overtreating patients at the end of life. He discusses key findings and ways to address this continued problem with Robert A. Figlin, MD, the Steven Spielberg Family Chair in Hematology-Oncology at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. “When one reads practice guidelines, they never include a section of when further treatment is more likely to be harmful than helpful,” Dr. Cherny notes. “Unless it appears in every illness guideline, the message does not necessarily get through that this is something that is really important.”