friendship Archives - Alert & Oriented

Medical friendship at the end of life

Michel AccadJanuary 20, 2016December 13, 2016Medical practicefriendship1 Comment

Pat, a non-physician reader, writes:

I read your two articles on friendship for more explicit clues on how to deliver very bad news, and wondered if you would consider publishing something on this topic as part 3 of this series. My prompt is a close friend with cancer, and she’s not getting better. At her last visit, the message she took home was: “there’s not much more we can do for you other than more chemotherapy, and we’re not even sure that it will do any good.” This was a complete and sudden loss of hope.

Two thoughts come to mind.

The first is from Viktor Frankl. In Man’s Search for Meaning he says: “Those who know how close the connection between the state of mind of a man – his courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.”

The second is from Atul Gawande’s book, On Being Mortal. He describes two approaches to giving bad news. Dr. Informative supplies hard cognitive information: cold facts, descriptions, outcome possibilities, statistics. A doctor’s other approach might be to look for an opportunity to start the conversation with “I’m worried” and then continue with the patient in an “ask, tell, ask” process. In this approach, the direction of travel becomes clear more gently and perhaps gives the patient a little more time to walk into the possibility than being crashed into it.

…I would be especially interested to read your views from the doctor’s side in the context of your two blogs on the friendship dimension in the doctor-patient relationship.

Continue reading “Medical friendship at the end of life”

Good medicine starts with friendship

Michel AccadNovember 20, 2015December 13, 2016Ethics, Medical practice, Philosophydoctor-patient relationship, friendshipLeave a comment

Whenever I have the opportunity to suggest that good medicine is based on friendship, I usually get a nod of approval mixed with a quizzical look. What’s that supposed to mean?!

At a recent meeting of an editorial board on which I serve, the reaction to my suggestion was more forceful and perhaps more honest. The topic of the day concerned patient education, and how hard it can be to move patients to do things like exercise more or eat better. I timidly proposed that, as physicians, we might want to start by being our patients’ friends. The physician sitting next to me immediately objected: “I wouldn’t go that far!”Continue reading “Good medicine starts with friendship”

Neither expert nor businessman: the physician as friend.

Michel AccadOctober 15, 2015December 13, 2016Ethics, Healthcare policy, Medical practice, Philosophydoctor-patient relationship, friendship, outcomes2 Comments

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, authors Erin Sullivan and Andy Ellner take a stand against the “outcomes theory of value,” advanced by such economists as Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan who believe that in order to “properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level.”

In contrast, Sullivan and Ellner point out that medical care is first of all a matter of relationships:

With over 50% of primary care providers believing that efforts to measure quality-related outcomes actually make quality worse, it seems there may be something missing from the equation. Relationships may be the key…Kurt Stange, an expert in family medicine and health systems, calls relationships “the antidote to an increasingly fragmented and depersonalized health care system.”

In their article, Sullivan and Ellner describe three success stories of practice models where an emphasis on relationships led to better care.

But in describing these successes, do the authors undermine their own argument? For in order to identify the quality of the care provided, they point to improvements in patient satisfaction surveys in one case, decreased rates of readmission in another, and fewer ER visits and hospitalizations in the third. In other words…outcomes!Continue reading “Neither expert nor businessman: the physician as friend.”