Quality of life in cancer patients: clinical considerations and perspectives.

Maintaining "quality of life" for a cancer patient is analogous to caring for the "whole" patient. Such care should include integration of multispecialty services, on-going patient education, attention to supportive care, and efforts to achieve organ preservation. Also to be taken into account are such factors as the extraordinarily heterogeneous backgrounds of cancer patients, the degree of involvement of the patient's family, and the financial implications of cancer and its treatment. These considerations require the primary physician and the rest of the care team to individualize their approach to each patient. All medical personnel must also realize that effective, honest communication may improve quality of life, even in those patients whose medical conditions are the poorest.