Breast Cancer, Essay Example

“Cancer” is still probably one of the most emotionally loaded words in healthcare, and dealing with patients who have or might have this condition can be different even from patients who have other serious chronic conditions like congestive heart failure.  Perhaps one of the most challenges stages in this disease, from the point of view of the clinician, is having to diagnose and inform the patient about whether or not they have cancer.  Test results like the BRCA can take a while to come back and in the meantime, the patient’s fear and anxiety are building to sometimes almost unmanageable levels. The connotations of this word can have such an impact on the patient that trying to communicate health information to them can be difficult: they are in an emotionally overwhelmed state and cannot always respond rationally.  This can be especially true if, like the patient in this example, loved ones have already been lost to this disease.

If I were the clinician in this case, I would still try to reach out to the patient in question to talk to her again about the test without necessarily telling her what the results were without her consent.  Clearly in this case, the patient’s anxiety level is very high and I think it would be cruel to let someone suffer with worry like that when there is nothing to worry about.  I would probably enlist the help of a counsellor or social worker if there was one available on staff to contact the patient and talk to her about the benefits of this test.  It might also be helpful to get into contact with the woman’s primary care physician – if the PCP were different in this case – to help.  But if the patient still said no to the results of the test, I would have to honor that.

The human factor is healthcare is what can make being a clinician an art as well as a science.  In order to be an effective clinician, you have to now only have good theoretical and applied medical knowledge, you also have to be able to deal with the emotional and psychological aspects of patient care, which are not nearly so clear-cut.  Every patient is different and every response to that patient should be different, too.