ABSTRACT
Early introduction of palliative care in the management of patients with metastatic lung cancer is recommended since it improves quality of life and improves survival rates. In many hospitals the focus of palliative teams is often on terminal care due to limited resources. How is Early palliative care (EPC) in this setting implemented in daily oncologic care? It seems obvious that thoracic oncologists will have to become involved in EPC for lung cancer patients. In this review we want to determine the assignments for the thoracic oncologist in EPC and to give some practical tools how we started EPC in collaboration with the palliative team.
Subject(s)
Lung Neoplasms/therapy , Cooperative Behavior , Disease Management , Humans , Oncology Service, Hospital , Palliative Care/methods , Quality of Life , Terminal Care/methodsABSTRACT
Optical technological applications have upgraded polishing, including flat-surface polishing, to an extremely high level of geometrical precision. We deal with the application of this type of precision technology for the preparation of, e.g., silicon or fused-silica wafers that are thin compared to their diameter. To this end a standard optical polishing process using a double-sided polishing machine was modified by giving the polishing pad holder an adaptable curvature. By carefully choosing the process conditions 10-cm-diameter silicon and fused-silica wafers (500-µm thickness) were obtained with a very small deviation from parallelism in the 0.01-µm range. The level of smoothness, surface and subsurface damage, was identical with that required for integrated-circuit processing.
