Applying evidence-based symptomatic treatments from other clinical disciplines to palliative care

The evidence base for palliative care has seen a steady increase in the number of high-quality randomised controlled studies that have significantly contributed to
improving patients’ and caregivers’ care in this setting. Adequately powered phase III studies are the gold standard in establishing a causal link between the intervention and the outcome. Ideally, studies conducted in other clinical disciplines (with comparable populations) would be repeated in palliative care populations to confirm the benefits and harms of any proposed non-pharmacological or pharmacological intervention but this is costly, timeconsuming, resource intensive and may be difficult to justify ethically if the results from another clinical discipline
can reasonably be applied to palliative care patients.