Spokane medical resident Logan Patterson, a recent WSU College of Medicine graduate, wishes he had been taught more about how to relate to and care for patients who are preparing to die. He and others from WSU wrote a paper about the subject for the periodical Academic Medicine.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Logan Patterson: I think most medical students have some sort of exposure to death within their family. For me, it was my grandmother and her decline with Alzheimer’s disease and then subsequent passing. That was a big motivating factor for me deciding to apply to medical school in the first place and become a doctor, which was a big change for me because I was a tech consultant briefly between undergrad and medical school…