The Messiness of Medical Decision Making in Advanced Illness: A Podcast with James Tulsky
Anyone who cares for individuals with serious illness must live in a messy space where tough conversations about treatment decisions are common and complicated.\xa0\xa0
On today\u2019s podcast we talk with James Tulsky about living in this messy space of medical decision making and the challenges that come with communication around advanced treatment decisions.\xa0
We talked about James\u2019 path to the work that he has done, including early studies he did that included audio recording DNR discussions between physicians and patients, to his most recent study looking at the \u201cTriadic agreement about advanced cancer treatment decisions.\u201d\xa0\xa0\xa0
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In this last study, James\u2019 group surveyed 70 triads of patients, caregivers, and their oncologists shortly after making a cancer treatment decision and found that only 40% of triads completely agreed on the goal of treatment. In all of the remaining cases, at least one member of the triad disagreed about the goal of treatment.\xa0
So take a listen and also check out this wonderful ACP article that James did with Joshua Lakin and Rachelle Bernacki titled \u201cTime Out Before Talking: Communication as a Medical Procedure\u201d which we also discuss on the podcast.\xa0