From Acute to Chronic: Palliative Care and the Standardization of Cancer Survivorship.

Western societies have been experiencing a continuous increase in the longevity of their populations. This is due to factors such as changes in people's quality of life and advances in the field of health, especially in preventive medicine. However, many countries are also witnessing a significant demographic change, with the inversion of the age pyramid. The increase in the elderly population, combined with the development of new medical technologies, generates a new demand for care for the chronicity of previously potentially fatal diseases, such as cancer. This study discusses the social repositioning of the oncology patient as a chronic patient based on the notions of relationality and survivorship. The objective is to investigate the discursive practices in Palliative Care in order to characterize the values from which this field normalizes the experience of surviving cancer. The methodology adopted involves a critical and discursive analysis of the reference literature on the subject. The results indicate that the biological perspective of oncology, by using survival curves and prognostic projections, reduces the complexity of “living” with cancer, focusing on a model centered on the disease and specific solutions, often limiting the experience to a binary outcome of cure or death. In this way, the cancer survivor occupies a non-place in the medical oncology discourse. Palliative Care, on the other hand, strives in a pedagogical process of acquiring new values about the disease, seeking to positively value and treat the “incurable” patient as the target of its interventions, even though it continues to be stigmatized as a practice focused exclusively on the end of life. In any case, Palliative Care occupies the space of formulating the quality of life parameters that should organize the experience of cancer survivorship.