Re:Beware early adopters (Score 1)

My wife's an oncologist, and one of the toughest parts of the job has been learning how to talk to patients with fatal diseases. I thought it was interesting that her medical school offered a class about it, entitled "Living with a Life Threatening Illness." http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/04.06/dying.html It makes me appreciate what doctors go through.

From the article: "The course originated from wrenching situations experienced by two medical students. Anne Hallward had worked as a hospital chaplain before coming to Harvard Medical School. Part of her job involved accompanying physicians, usually interns, when they gave families the news of the sudden death of loved ones. The doctors, Hallward recalls, felt enormous anxiety, sometimes clutching her arm and asking her what to say. The result was that they often gave information about an unexpected death in cold, hurried words loaded with medical jargon. As a third-year medical student who was part of a surgical team, Joshua Hauser found that the surgeons were poorly prepared for handling the fear, pain, and sadness felt by patients nearing the end of their lives. In exploring the situation further, he got a lot of insight from conversations with a woman suffering from metastatic breast cancer. The woman had once asked doctors at a medical conference why they were not taught more about how to communicate with people about death and dying."

It must help to have someone communicate this type of information who has experience doing so, and who can help you evaluate it rationally. Well, as least as much as rationality has a place when we're talking about death (de Certeau has a good chapter about this in Practice of Everyday Life that we were just discussing).