[Can the quality of life be quantified?]

In oncology the question of quality of live leads to a strong but rather academic opposition between practitioners in favor of psychotherapeutic approach and those who prefer psychometric and statistical treatments of such matter. Possibilities of articulations can be found if we don't forget two conditions: first, the very aim of patient's quality of life preoccupation, and secondly, the double meaning, epistemological and ethical of the problem connected with quantification of quality of life. This allows to make a distinction between two strategies in the use questionnaires: do we look for positive definition of Q.O.L. or do we proceed in a negative way, looking for "symptoms". This second way is perfectly compliable with the approach of the patient as a subject in his irreducible singularity. On the opposite positive strategy deals with social imagination. It can produce prescriptive effects and induce the questionnee to certain answers concerning Q.O.L. For instance implicit bad image of illness and overevaluation of definitions modeled by majority consensus. Palliative care implies a concept of medicine which day by day defines goals, and pays attention to "this patient and at this moment" desires and projects. Palliative medicine puts forward a logic of the singular versus a logic of the particular which is determinant in the euthanasia movement. Quantification is necessary and is not, de principio, opposed to the care of a singular subject and patient, if we consider methods used by quantification and results so provided, not as "more objective data" but only "a necessary moment of objectivation". This objectivation in return, implies choices and subjectivities. Statistical quantification is not sheltered from fantasies, nor from political goals, chiefly in the way questionnaire address to the questionnee.