BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
How Doctors Deliver Bad News
Doctors are trying new ways of solving an old problem: how to tell
patients they aren’t going to get well. In The Wall Street Journal,
doctors and patients share opinions about the importance of empathy
in breaking bad news.
“Often what happens is clinicians just keep talking and it’s just white noise for the patient. You
need to attend to the fact that this is really serious news and attend to the emotion.”
—James Tulsky, MD, Chief of Duke Palliative Care
“If you don’t balance out the physiological basis of disease and treatment of disease with the
psychosocial side of medicine, you’re at risk of alienating patients and their families. How much
do people want to know? What techniques should be used? It’s a moving target.”
—Andrew Epstein, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Doctors and Nurses, Not
Learning Together
“In all that time [as a first-year resident],
there is surprisingly little education on
wh