“Without hope, they say, what’s the point? And it’s always a rhetorical question. In my years at the bedside and at the podium in palliative care, I have never heard hope wondered much about, or challenged, or talked about as if it were anything other than goodness incarnate and the secret ingredient that makes Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and living and dying make sense. A few years ago some researchers proposed to test what variable had the most significant impact on physicians’ ability to accurately predict the course of their palliative patients’ disease trajectory. One of the things they discovered in their test group was that the prognostic accuracy decreased in an “overly optimistic direction” the longer the patient-physician relationship went on.”
Our addiction to hope
Our addiction to hope
Our addiction to hope
“Without hope, they say, what’s the point? And it’s always a rhetorical question. In my years at the bedside and at the podium in palliative care, I have never heard hope wondered much about, or challenged, or talked about as if it were anything other than goodness incarnate and the secret ingredient that makes Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and living and dying make sense. A few years ago some researchers proposed to test what variable had the most significant impact on physicians’ ability to accurately predict the course of their palliative patients’ disease trajectory. One of the things they discovered in their test group was that the prognostic accuracy decreased in an “overly optimistic direction” the longer the patient-physician relationship went on.”