Rev. Danny Fisher

Photo by Dana Neely for Getty Images.
This from dear Secundra Beasley: Dr. Pauline W. Chen writes for the New York Times about “talking frankly at the end of life” in the wake of her own mother-in-law’s death.

“Death” and “dying” are words that can echo in a room long after they are said. Hopes can be shattered in an instant. Patients and families may feel abandoned.

It is hard as a doctor not to wonder: Am I doing more harm than good?

One particular study came back to me during these last few weeks, a study that attempted to answer just this question. Published last fall in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the study examined how end-of-life care discussions with terminal patients affected their quality of life and that of their caregivers.

Over the course of almost six years, Professor Holly Prigerson, director of the Center for Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and her colleagues interviewed more than 300 terminal patients, asking them if their doctors had ever discussed care at the end of life. After these patients died, the investigators analyzed the type of medical care received prior to death, then interviewed the patients’ caregivers six months later to assess how they were adjusting to their loss.

What Dr. Prigerson and her co-investigators found was that those patients who had had discussions with their physicians were more likely to have better quality of life at the end of their lives. These patients were not more depressed or more worried as a result of these discussions, and they tended to receive less aggressive medical care and earlier hospice referrals. Moreover, their caregivers fared better and suffered from significantly less depression six months after the patient’s death than caregivers whose loved ones had received more aggressive care.

Read the rest here.