Acs Research - Theorylab

When a cancer patient has a serious diagnosis, clinicians and families can struggle with how patients experience hope. Three distinguished palliative care physicians and researchers joined the podcast for a conversation about their recent paper in JAMA titled, “Holding Hope for Patients with Serious Illness” (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2784454). Drs. Abby Rosenberg, Robert Arnold, and Yael Schenker shared their own experiences treating seriously ill patients and talked about how we can navigate the tension between appreciating the potential therapeutic benefit of hope and being concerned about perceived unrealistic hopes: “Rather than being concerned that hope is either so fragile that it can be lost, or so powerful that it can overwhelm decision making, clinicians should remember that hope is protective, if not necessary, for managing serious illness. Holding complex, flexible, and diverse hopes enables patients to believe in the unlikely while simultaneously accepting the ine