Palliative chemotherapy: harms and benefits weighed in new study. Palliative chemotherapy is treatment designed for terminal cancer patients to prolong survival and ease symptoms but not cure disease. Now, researchers have found that the therapy comes with certain harms, which they say need to be addressed. Chemotherapy usually helps shrink tumors and treat them effectively. Some examples are lymphomas, leukemias, and testicular cancers. For cancers that have metastasized (when the disease spreads to different parts of the body), chemotherapy is required in combination with other treatment modalities. Palliative chemotherapy helps in increasing the life expectancy of metastatic cancer patients. The severity and the kind of side effects that affect one after chemotherapy have considerably improved over the past two decades but general symptoms that prevail are fatigue, hair loss, weight loss, loss of appetite and changes in blood count. But symptoms that arise usually depend on the nature of chemotherapy itself and the kind of tumor that is being treated.