Harvey Max Chochinov is a psychiatrist.
Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement and palliative care, famously said, “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life.” This quote has become the central philosophical tenet of palliative care. It implores us to remind patients, who may be feeling helpless, hopeless, or worthless, that they matter. There is abundant evidence that patients approaching death are susceptible to …
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie was recently released by Apple TV+ and provides a ringside seat to the daily, formidable challenges facing the actor since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease more than 30 years ago.
There is, of course, tremendous irony in this movie’s title, given Parkinson’s disease, a non-curable neurodegenerative disease that affects well over six million people around the world, denies those afflicted the ability to keep …
In February, just a few months after being elected to the United States Senate, Pennsylvania politician John Fetterman entered into a treatment program for depression. In an interview with CBS News show Sunday Morning last month, he recounted suffering a stroke in May 2022, then fighting through a grueling Senate race that severely impacted his mental health. “You may have won,” he recalled thinking, “but depression can absolutely convince you …
While being treated for an aggressive hematologic cancer, the former head of a department of medicine at a large teaching hospital told me he wished he could hang a sign on his headboard, reading P-I-P: Previously-Important-Person. Despite extraordinary achievements, skills, credentials, and status, being a patient made him feel like an amalgam of parts; limbs, bodily fluids, organs, and orifices, all now suspect, some more wayward than others — and …
The last time I was in Israel, I went on some home visits with a palliative care physician in the town of Sfat near the Sea of Galilee. My colleague, a devout Jewish doctor, took me to several homes to offer advice on managing his most serious, terminally ill patients. One older Chassidic Rabbi was dealing with an advanced lung cancer, and having a difficult time accepting any kind of …
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