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.
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A Medical Humanist’s Notes
CCM co-founder, Celia Engel Bandman, created the blog “A Medical Humanist’s Notes” to explore the lived world of illness and how improved communication can lead patients, healthcare professionals and loved ones to an informed and empathetic course of treatment.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
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...
We’re All Confused
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...
No Recognizable Guideposts
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...
Waiting for…
In my work as a medical humanist, I would often hear cancer patients talk about anxiously waiting for appointments, test results and possible side effects of treatments, as if these were common experiences in medical care. With these concerns in mind, I offered...
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...
Line of Sight
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...
One Door Closes, Another Opens
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...
WRITING IS GOOD MEDICINE
Center for Communication in Medicine co-founder Celia Engel Bandman developed Writing is Good Medicine® while serving as a “medical humanist” at a cancer center in Vermont. Workshops were designed for patients, loved ones and medical professionals to help explore the experience of those living with illness and those caring for them.