Sometimes, you get so caught up on the one disease that you're treating or one area of the body and that we forget there's an entire person with beliefs and values and things that are important to them.

And so with palliative medicine, that's something that we wanna make sure whatever we're treating and whatever we're doing is what the patient wants and helps them have the things that are important to them and the quality of life that they want.

- Do you see that often where patients, you know, maybe a doctor wants to treat a patient a special way or with a certain treatment and the patient doesn't want that, they would rather go a different route?

- Yes, we do see that pretty often.

And I think that's where our specialty also plays an important role.

Because we help.

That's where like our goals-of-care conversations and getting the families together with the patient becomes important just to really establish what's important to them, what their goals are, you know, give them their treatment options versus, you know, what life could possibly look like without those treatments, and go from there on establishing really what their goals and their wishes are.

- Is that a hard talk to have with patients and families?

- It very much is a hard talk.

And unfortunately, it's something that not a lot of people want to think about or talk about until they have to.

So just getting the conversation going sometimes can be difficult.

But I personally find, usually, once you start the conversation with the patients and the families, by the time they're done, it's provided them with some clarification about things that maybe they hadn't thought about up to that point even.