When it comes to teaching new doctors how to care for patients near death, medical textbooks are failing the grade, a study says. Modern medical textbooks offer little instruction on social, spiritual, ethical and family issues that come toward the end of life, says a report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association . The result, the study says, is that most doctors are taught well how to fight death but are uncomfortably ill-equipped when the medical tide turns and death is inevitable. Death isn't even a word in many medical dictionaries. Death is the enemy.
Medical textbooks tend to teach doctors throughout their careers.
When doctors face challenging cases years after medical school, they often turn to their textbooks for guidance. And there is a growing body of such information on the Internet for both doctors and patients. The study was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The review of the textbooks comes at a time when the medical community is trying to improve the level of care patients get as they die. Rabow says that when doctors aren't proficient in a certain area of care, they tend to be uncomfortable in that part of their practice.