According to a new study many patients suffering with cancer think that chemotherapy will cure their disease when it's not very likely and a guaranteed cure.
A survey conducted by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston included 1,200 cancer patients who have undergone diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer or colorectal cancer. Nearly 70 percent of people with advanced lung cancer and 81 percent of those with advanced colorectal cancer had faith that chemotherapy with provide them with cure.
In certain cases, Chemotherapy can give few extra weeks or may be months but it is unlikely to provide a complete cure.
"I was really surprised," said lead study author Jane Weeks, a professor at Harvard Medical School. "Prior studies have suggested maybe a third of patients don't understand. Those studies are done in the optimal setting though, and this was the first to look at a big population. I thought the numbers were disturbingly high.
"If patients do not know whether a treatment offers a realistic possibility of cure, their ability to make informed treatment decisions that are consistent with their preferences may be compromised. This misunderstanding may pose obstacles to optimal end-of-life planning."
The survey also interviewed the patients about the experience with their oncologists about the treatment. Surprisingly the patients who said their doctors were the best, sincere, and transparent were more likely to have mistaken and false expectations.
Thomas Smith, MD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dan Longo, MD, a deputy editor of the journal, who said the problem could be miscommunication and defining "cure" to their patients, "If patients actually have unrealistic expectations of a cure from a therapy that is administered with palliative intent, we have a serious problem of miscommunication that we need to address."
