Increasing the benefits of chemotherapy by ameliorating the adverse effects.

When cancer is first diagnosed in most patients, it is usually incurable. Chemotherapy can cause remissions, prolonged disease-free survival, and prolonged survival in general, but it is associated with considerable toxicity to the physical and mental well-being of the patient. The number of side-effects increases when multiple drug combinations are used. In addition, financial and social problems add to the stress of coping with a fatal disease. Therefore both patients and physicians have asked whether survival (sometimes for extra months) with added side-effects of chemotherapy is worthwhile. The "soft" index of quality of life has been measured by many investigators, and a variety of interventions have been found to alleviate some distress.