editorial Breaking bad news in oncology: like a walk in the twilight? While communicating good news is a pleasurable experience in our everyday lives, professional or private, communicating bad news is an uncomfortable experience for both the giver and the receiver. The expression 'bad news', used to describe difficult communications, is open to interpretation and misunderstanding since it seem...

BACKGROUND While psychosocial distress and supportive care needs of young adult cancer patients have been increasingly studied, little knowledge exists about preferences for communicating bad news. We aimed to analyze patients' communication preferences against their actual experiences with regard to doctor-patient interactions. PATIENTS AND METHODS We surveyed a total of 270 cancer patients ...

OBJECTIVE Communicating the discontinuation of anticancer treatment to patients is a difficult task. The primary aim of this study was to clarify the level of oncologist-reported burden when communicating about discontinuation of an anticancer treatment. The secondary aims were (i) to identify the sources of burden contributing to their levels and (ii) to explore the useful strategies to allevi...

OBJECTIVES Breaking of medical bad news is anecdotally deemed culturally unacceptable, even intolerable, to native Africans. We explored this hypothesis among a cohort of relatives of patients who had difficult neurosurgical diagnoses in an indigenous practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS A semi-structured, interviewer-administered questionnaire was used in a cross-sectional survey among a consecut...