A pioneer in defining the role of medical humanist; Ms. Bandman is a writer, co-founder of the Center for Communication in Medicine and co-author of CCM’s signature tool, SpeakSooner®: A Patient’s Guide to Difficult Conversations.
We are all grateful for high-tech innovations in medical science. In a recent blog I spoke about the benefits of artificial intelligence in helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and develop more effective treatment plans. Despite these advances in technology, a...
There is little doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have a profound effect on healthcare delivery. This technology has the potential to improve medical diagnoses and treatment planning. AI can also generate documentation for medical records and save...
Recently, I was thinking about the Rolling Stones lyric “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need” and found myself checking the dictionary for the definitions of “want” and “need.” I discovered that “want” is a...
There are no rules for proper behavior, conversation or actions when there’s an advancement of a serious illness and no viable treatment options. Patients can find themselves confused when trying to communicate with family and friends about a dire prognosis and an...
In a 1988 Village Voice article “The Land of The Sick,” Paul Cowan spoke of his experience of illness and declared, “It is a world that has its own language, its own geography, its own authority figures and its own calendar dictated by the changes in one’s body or by...
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...
I have found that many patients feel the need to protect their loved ones from hearing about the physical and emotional ordeal of living with serious illness. An example of this dynamic emerged in the video that accompanies SpeakSooner: A Patient’s Guide to Difficult...
I recently discovered an article I wrote titled “A Medical Humanist Says Good-bye” that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (July 9, 2008). It recounted the role of medical humanist I created at the cancer center in Bennington, Vermont and...
As with all newly diagnosed patients, I would introduce myself and explain the role of a medical humanist on the cancer care team, emphasizing how I could help to facilitate communication with their doctor about what may not have been understood regarding their...
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....
