Prigerson is a professor at Weil Cornell Medical College and Harvard Medical School, and her co-authors are all professors at Columbia, Yale, Duke, Michigan, etc. Her report in JAMA Oncology created a bit of a stir in medical circles. To date, it has been referenced 200+ times in other journal articles (an indication of its impact).
In this paper, they spoke in unusually direct terms for academics:
The quality of life “in patients with end-stage cancer is not improved, and can be harmed, by chemotherapy use near death, even in patients with good performance status.”
Yet, aside from a few blogs or specialized websites, there was a virtual news blackout on this major study on the futility of palliative chemo. It had intrinsic merit. But reporters shied away from the topic, probably because it is depressing to learn that a major form of therapy is so counterproductive.
Difficulty Researching This Topic
There is in fact a systematic bias in the reporting of negative effects of chemo. To illustrate the problem, a PubMed search of the words benefit of cancer chemotherapy returned 22,645 citations to research papers. But a search of the words harm of cancer chemotherapy returned just 261 such citations, about 1% of the positive ones!
