Hope, Symptoms, and Palliative Care.

Background: Hope is important to patients with cancer. Identifying factors that influence hope is important. Anxiety, depression, fatigue, and pain are reported to impair hope.

Achieving effective control in cancer pain: a review of current guidelines.

Pain is one of the most common and distressing elements of suffering related to cancer and cancer treatment. Progress in cancer treatment means people will live longer with the sequelae of cancer and disease-directed treatments, and both the short- and long-term effects of opioid use must be considered. Skilled practitioners caring for individuals with cancer help to alleviate cancer-related pain by using the World Health Organization (WHO) step-wise approach to pain management as well as recently updated national and international guidelines.