Talking to Cancer Patients and their Relatives

Ann Faulkner, Peter Maguire Oxford University Press, pounds sterling15.95, pp 200 ISBN 0 19 261605 6 Apatient volunteered to me that she had been to see her general practitioner about a problem. “He's one of those modern sorts of doctor. You know: he talks to you.” Talking to patients, at least in the way that she meant, is a modern sort of thing. It didn't exist when I was a junior doctor in the early ‘70s. Patients were not usually told that they had cancer. We knew that patients in the United States were given information about their diagnosis and even took part in the …