The Need to Prioritize and Re-prioritize Palliative Care Options: Smoking Cessation as a Case-in-Point

Palliative care in cancer patients requires a continuous reprioritization of effort. This review describes the need for this reprioritization and uses smoking cessation as a case-in-point. The treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer has changed dramatically in the past few years. Interestingly, patients who had previously smoked now have an improved prognosis—for a variety of reasons. This review discusses this last observation in detail and raises the question of how forcefully we should advise smoking cessation in patients with incurable metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.