Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Any information that produces a negative alteration to a person's expectations about the future can be defined as bad news ( Buckman 1992 ). Notwithstanding that there are instances in which information is in all probability universally appraised as bad, such as the sudden diagnosis of a fatal disease, most published articles on the topic adhere to the basic assumption that bad news is subjective and depends on individual differences in personality, personal resources, cognitive appraisals, expectations, and so on. Medical information, then, is defined as bad news only when a patient appraises it as such after its disclosure. The medical literature has focused primarily on the physician's perspective on communicating bad news. Research investigating the patient's perspective is scarce. Questions include how to break bad news successfully, and how physicians and patients experience the delivery of bad news. The two questions are strongly related, for physicians’ and patients’ experiences not only guide how bad news is communicated, they also partly define the extent to which the communication of bad news can be considered successful (→  Health Communication ; Doctor–Patient Talk ). The medical literature on communicating bad news has been largely nonempirical, involving editorials, reviews, and opinion pieces. In the paradigms typically used to study the communication of bad news ... log in or subscribe to read full text