Doctors are often called upon to deliver bad news to patients, and there isn’t much that’s worse than a diagnosis of an advanced-stage cancer for which there is no cure.
But there’s new evidence that a surprisingly large majority of patients who receive this news don’t fully comprehend it, or perhaps willfully choose to ignore it.
Almost three out of every four patients diagnosed with stage IV lung or colon cancer believe that chemotherapy can cure them of their disease, according to a survey of more than 1,100 cancer patients by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. And yet for cancers diagnosed at that late of a stage, chemotherapy has been definitively shown to extend lifespan by only a few months at best.
Deborah Schrag, a physician at Dana-Farber who helped conduct the study, says patients who don’t understand the severity of their diagnosis can’t make plans for their final few months or years.
The survey, which appears [recently] in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found that patients who rated their doctor as being a good communicator were more likely to hold mistaken beliefs about their prognosis. Schrag says this indicates that some doctors may be trying to tell their patients what they think they want to hear, rather than the truth.
