Advance care planning allows people to reflect on what is important to them, and what care they'd want if they become critically ill, says Stanford physician Grant Smith.
A pervasive myth in medicine is that doctors shouldn't talk about death with their patients. But Stephanie Harman, MD, knows better. During her first week of …
Withdrawing or withholding invasive medical treatments to keep very ill patients in the ICU comfortable and communicative may not hasten their death.
A Stanford-designed computer algorithm helps doctors predict the lifespan of patients with metastatic cancer by looking for clues in their own exam notes.
Stanford's Manali Patel found higher satisfaction and lower costs for advanced cancer patients who spoke with a nonclinical worker about care preferences.
For many of us, the topic of how we want to spend our final days rarely comes up in discussions with our family members or …
Each year, about 2.6 million people die in America. Although past research has shown that 7 out of 10 of us prefer to die at …
Remember “death panels?" In the summer of 2009, in the midst of the debate about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, a small item in …
SMS (“Stanford Medical School”) Unplugged is a forum for students to chronicle their experiences in medical school. The student-penned entries appear on Scope once a …
Updated 3-11-15: Paul Kalanithi passed away on March 9. *** Updated 10-23-14: Paul Kalanithi spoke about this topic on campus earlier this week; more on the event, …
"Dying in America is harder than it has to be." That’s the headline of one of the stories published following the release of the Institute …
Updated 8-4-14: The video is no longer posted on the Al Jazzera website, but the online story is still available. *** 7-30-14: Is it possible …
When I interviewed Manali Patel, MD, a Stanford oncologist, for an article on improving poor-prognosis cancer care, she cited a shocking statistic: Less than a …
Medical innovations have enabled us to wring a few more days, or months, out of life for the terminally ill; and anyone who's lost a …
