Medicine and man's fall

If medicine were simply a matter of prescribing drugs and wielding scalpels then monkeys—or at least robots—might make adequate doctors. It's the human bit, as in most enterprises, that makes medicine tricky, fascinating, and difficult. Medical journals might be accused of ignoring much of that complexity with their diet of drug trials and systematic reviews. Increasingly, however, we are publishing qualitative research that probes the interactions between doctors and patients.

Three authors from Australia and Canada have asked patients receiving palliative care and their families what they want to be told and found …