Patients as Real Time Teachers

During my tenure as a medical humanist at a cancer center in Vermont, I was an eyewitness to the challenges that patients and healthcare providers faced in communicating about serious illness. What I learned became source material for the Center for Communication in Medicine’s (CCM) programs and tools to improve healthcare communication. Although the educational […]

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Who’s This For?

In the video accompanying SpeakSooner: A Patient’s Guide to Difficult Conversations we hear Fritz, who’s living with advanced prostate cancer, acknowledge that the rewards of continuing treatment more than exceed the risks but understands that there are no guarantees. He states that he and his wife decide together “to do whatever my physician thought was […]

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Who Am I Doing This For?

In the video that accompanies SpeakSooner: A Patient’s Guide to Difficult Conversations, we hear Fritz acknowledge that the rewards of continuing treatment more than exceed the risks but he recognizes there are no guarantees. Living with advanced prostate cancer, Fritz states that he and his wife decide together “to do whatever my physician thought was […]

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Does Spirituality Have a Place in Healthcare?

The role of spirituality in facing a health crisis varies from patient to patient. For healthcare providers, who rely on medical science, it can be a contentious subject. We posed the question of spirituality to a group of cancer patients who were interviewed for the Center for Communication in Medicine’s video Voices From the Lived […]

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