Suffering With Advanced Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The alleviation of suffering is a central goal of palliative care, but little research has addressed the construct of suffering as a global experience of the whole person. We inquired into the sense of suffering among patients with advanced cancer to investigate its causes and correlates. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Semistructured interviews were administered to 381 patients. The interviews inquired about physical symptoms, social concerns, psychological problems, and existential issues. We also asked, "In an overall, general sense, do you feel that you are suffering?" RESULTS: Almost half (49.3%) of respondents did not consider themselves to be suffering, and 24.9% felt that they suffered only mildly. However, 98 participants (25.7%) were suffering at a moderate-to-extreme level. The latter participants were more likely to experience significant distress on 20 of the 21 items addressing symptoms and concerns; the highest correlations were with general malaise (rho [rho]= 0.56), weakness ( = 0.42), pain ( = 0.40), and depression ( = .39). In regression analyses, physical symptoms, psychological distress, and existential concerns, but not social issues, contributed to the prediction of suffering. In qualitative narratives, physical problems accounted for approximately half (49.5%) of patient reports of suffering, with psychological, existential, and social concerns accounting for 14.0%, 17.7%, and 18.8%, respectively. CONCLUSION: Many patients with advanced cancer do not consider themselves to be suffering. For those who do, suffering is a multidimensional experience related most strongly to physical symptoms, but with contributions from psychological distress, existential concerns, and social-relational worries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".