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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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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Injecting Humanism Into Medicine

I had the good fortune of working with the late Dr. James Wallace, the first oncologist in the State of Vermont, who came out of retirement to practicing part-time at the cancer center in Bennington. He would talk about the early days at the National Institute of Health (NIH) when chemotherapy was mostly experimental. In passing, he told me that a colleague at that time was Dr. Sidney Farber, the name attached to Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. While at NIH he worked with pioneers in the new field of oncology.

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Can Telling Stories Help?

In a New Yorker article “Why Storytelling Is Part Of Being A Good Doctor” (July 25, 2022) Dr. Jerome Groopman confides, “For two decades, I had seen my patients and their loved ones face some of life’s most uncertain moments, and I now felt driven to bear witness to their stories.” He tells us how he felt inspired to write about his experiences as a doctor as had others before him.

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