Palliative Therapies To Treat Mesothelioma

Palliative treatments involve treatment for mesothelioma using procedures that relieve symptoms. It does not cure the disease but helps in dealing with the problem by improving quality of life. It helps in psychological, social, and spiritual needs of patients and their families. It is also called as comfort care, supportive care or symptom management.
Symptoms of mesothelioma
Mesothelioma is caused due to the exposure of the patient to asbestos. As it is difficult to diagnosis this cancerous disease in the early stages, patients and doctors are unaware of early symptoms. Early symptoms are usually mistaken to simple illnesses like breathlessness, cough and weight loss. But with the advancement of the disease, the symptoms also become severe. Thus palliative therapy is used to provide relief for the pain caused during mesothelioma. It includes various modes of treatment like medication, cognitive and behavioral therapy along with various other procedures to help patients deal with the disease. Palliative therapy is used along with other forms of traditional treatment for mesothelioma like radiation therapy or chemotherapy.
The main goal of palliative therapies is to offer comfort and to sustain highest quality of life for as long as the patient lives. As the extent of pain experienced by the patients is very high, palliation includes traditional pain management programs like pain killers along with stress management, meditation and massage therapy. If a patient is in his death bed, this therapy takes the traditional roles of the hospice movement. For the patient and his families there is an open line of communication to optimize patient care.
Some of the common palliative procedures to treatment mesothelioma are:
Chest Tube Drainage and Pleurodesis: This results in irritation within the layers covering the lungs leading to destruction of space between the layers so that there is no accumulation of fluid. Various agents like talc or bleomycin can be used for this purpose. The fluid is then drained out of the chest cavity with the help of chest tube.
Pleuroperitoneal Shunt: This is effective among patients with a trapped lung or when treatment has been ineffective for a patient.
Alcohol injection: To ease pain, doctors inactivate the nerves that pass the message of pain from the affected area to the brain by injecting certain alcohol. This is usually done during the course of the surgery or with the help of CT scan.
Palliative radiation therapy: Pain is also reduced using radiation therapy as it kills certain cancer cells which press against nerves. Radiation is usually associated with anti-inflammatory as well as pain relievers to maximize the relief of the disease. With this kind of treatment about two third of patients have reasonable to maximum improvement and this effects remain for a few weeks to many months. In the case of palliative radiation therapy, mesothelioma patients are given few larger doses of radiation over a period of several weeks.
Pain medications: strong pain-killing drugs are also prescribed during this treatment to reduce pain including narcotic drugs, which are non addictive.