life help: Telling the bad news. - Help.com

Telling the bad news.

I’ve just read a very interesting post from an online obituaries website, obit-mag.com

Let’s imagine you are diagnosed with a terminal illness. And you have, say, just one or two years left to live. Or less. Do you want your physician to deliver the news to your face? And if so, when? And how?

Doctor puzzled about deathBluntly? As in: “Are you a fast writer? Good, because your will needs to be written in, tops, four weeks.” Or should the delivery of bad news to be accompanied by Hallmark euphemisms? (There are, for instance, hospices where the word death is hardly ever uttered. “Your father just passed” was the preferred mode of news delivery at the last place I volunteered. A visitor might have been pardoned for thinking the main complaint was kidney stones.)

Whatever your personal preferences, receiving news of your imminent demise from a doctor is a situation you’ll likely never have to face. And not because you’re not going to die. Or because you are likely to die peacefully in your sleep or suddenly and without notice on a super-highway, when a truck hits your hybrid. Only 10 percent of the population gets a speedy final exit. In 1990 cancer actually out-gunned heart disease as the No. 1 killer of Americans younger than 85. So what this means is, you will probably die slowly, only no one in the medical profession will want to tell you how bad things really are.

According to a recent federally funded survey run by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, two-thirds of all terminally ill cancer patients never hear the D-word from their doctors at all. And not just cancer patients. I have talked to Alzheimer’s specialists, internists, and surgeons – and their general consensus is: You’re better off not knowing. Even if you think otherwise. And anyway, most doctors don’t want to talk to you about it.

“Yes, isn’t it awful,” says Erika Schwartz, a New York internist, who also happens to be the medical director of the insurance company Cinergy. “This is what happens: Death is something you are trained from medical school on to fight against. You get to be the kind of person who thinks: Nobody dies on my shift!

“And so if somebody is really dying,” she adds, “the doctor gets the feeling that death is a personal insult – an insult to the doctor! You don’t want to admit to the fact that the death of a patient is even possible, because it represents your failure.”

You can read the rest of the post here: Giving the bad news.

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death, life, Obituaries (How Tags Affect Reciprocity)

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