He talks about his doctors, about how callously they told him he had one month to live. The lesson has begun. From the first day of their Living with Life-Threatening Illness class, HMS students are face to face with the realities of palliative care. After listening to a patient describe his situation, students discuss how the story made them feel and how they, as physicians, might have handled the situation differently. Also involved were two former Harvard medical students, Anne Hallward and Josh Hauser.
Billings asks rhetorically.
Billings and Block started the class to fill what they saw as a need for adequate education in the country's undergraduate medical curriculum to address those issues. Only 11 percent of undergraduate medical programs offer some formal teaching about death and dying, according to an article the two published in the September 3 Journal of the American Medical Association . Palliative care has, for years, been a subject that many physicians don't like to talk about. Teaching about palliative care is usually folded into scattered courses in other areas. During the class, each student is assigned to a terminal patient.