Palliative Care for Cancer Patients [Video]

Thanks to medical advances, cancer patients are living longer than ever before. “But with that comes the burden, because they end and the pain and sometimes it doesn’t go away after the completion of treatment.” It’s why Palliative Care Physicians like Dr. Diana Khalil are here to help. “In palliative care I ask my patients what do you want? And then we discuss the available options, and the patient gets to choose what’s appropriate for their life and then we take it from there. It’s an ongoing continuous process. It’s very dynamic. We adjust on a day-to-day basis.”

While the oncologist focuses on addressing the disease itself, “All that comes with a disease, and the treatment, and the symptoms, and side effects, and fear, and worries, and education, the palliative care takes care of that,” said Dr. Khalil.

The Lee Health Cancer Institute offers patients education, counseling, acupuncture, massage, nurse navigators, social workers, family support and more. “It’s really about the patient’s just living their lives with a disease in the background not having the disease as the center of focus in their life at that phase,” said Dr. Khalil.

A helping hand to improve patients’ quality of life. You can learn more by searching for palliative care on leehealth.org.

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Lee Health in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of health care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For more than 100 years, we’ve been providing our community with personalized preventative health services and primary care to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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