How Do You Tell Someone They Are Dying of Cancer

Nobody wants to tell someone else that they are going to die and there is no easy way to tell someone that their treatments have failed and/or they are going to die from cancer. Nobody wants to tell a cancer patient they have a terminal or incurable cancer and it's only a matter of a short time. It's never been easy to tell people of horrific future events in their lives.

And someone who is too blunt with a terminal cancer patient may find quite a bit of reflex and reactionary emotion coming back at them. An outburst filled with hostility, anger and pure hate. Of course, this is a reaction of fear and it is often coupled with denial and ignored. Thus, a doctor or loved one that is in charge of breaking the news needs to do it correctly. Otherwise, they may feel the effect of a "kill the messenger" syndrome, which is quite common.

In the book; "The Cancer Reference Book," the authors explain that; "according to various [psychological] studies 77 to 87 percent of the terminal cancer patients favored knowing the truth and 69 to 90 percent of the doctors favored avoiding the truth," yet, still either way the cancer patient has the right to know and if they are not told, this can often be more cruel.

Those who bring the bad news must do it in an empathetic way and allow dialogue back and forth and answer the questions honestly. It helps to have X-rays and graphics to show the cancer patient what is going on and break it down into laymen's terms. The cancer patient will have many questions, such as the time frame left, if they will be experiencing pain, if there are any other new medical cures or experimental drugs and such.

The doctor needs to be truthful without giving false hope. The patient's emotion will be filed with thoughts of divine intervention, anger, denial, depression, resignation, and hopefully eventually acceptance. Please approach this issue carefully, how you go about it will mean a lot to the person you are relaying the news to.

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