If you got diagnosed with a serious illness, do you think your doctor would be more honest about your future if YOU were a doctor too?

One of the most common reasons doctors avoid straight talk about life expectancy is because of a strong desire to preserve your hope. And honestly, that desire to preserve your hope holds strong whether or not you’ve got a medical background yourself.

Case in point, in the book the Hospice Doctor’s Widow by Jennifer O’Brien, a palliative care doctor with stage 4 cancer directly asks his oncologist to confirm that his cancer is not curable. And the oncologist responds with “we aren’t going to talk about that.”

Now here’s the thing. I’m confident this oncologist believed they were doing right by their patient in this situation. The problem is that medical training does not consistently teach up and coming doctors how to talk about hard truths with their patients. So docs have to adapt whatever approach they think is best. Sometimes it ends up being a good approach, and other times… not so much.

Why should you care about any of this? What this means for YOU is that if you are a straight shooter who wants the hard truth, who wants to know the odds, you really need to be persistent in asking for this information. You may need to ask a lot, but keep at it until you get the info you need.

Keep advocating! 💪🏻

PS: Do go check out Hospice Doctor’s Widow, it’s a wonderful book full of both hope and hard truth (this is an Amazon Associate link, which means I earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you)