Handbook of Psychooncology: Psychological Care of the Patient With Cancer

This worthwhile handbook appears as we enter the fourth decade of thanatological reform in American health care. Many of us began with high hopes in the 1960s. We believed that concern with death, dying, and bereavement would contribute to a deepened humanization of medical practice, against the prevailing ethos of technologically inspired medicine. Some among us have been forced by confrontation with disappointing reality to recognize that it is easier to lecture and write about introducing modifications into the physicianpatient relationship than it is to achieve them. In the workings of this extraordinary relationship lives the art—and heart—of medicine. It appears to me that it can be taught only to those who already possess it and seek facilitation for and affirmation of its use. The vital core of the art is empathy, and the inducing force, just as in its creation in early childhood, is a health professional role model