Palliative and Supportive Oncology Care

Care and treatment-intent approaches in cancer medicine that manage symptoms, monitor a slow-growing tumor, or support quality of life rather than aiming to destroy every cancer cell as quickly as possible. This includes palliative care and palliative sedation, hospice care for patients nearing the end of life, curative care as the treatment-intent counterpart to palliative approaches, and active surveillance, the structured watchful monitoring used for low-risk prostate cancer and low-risk papillary thyroid microcarcinoma, alongside watchful waiting more broadly. A monitoring or supportive approach that is really a diagnostic step before starting one of the other groups' active treatments is still grouped here, since surveillance and watchful waiting are themselves the treatment-intent choice this group covers.