In oncology communication practice, disclosing a poor prognosis to a patient is governed by a two-stage framework: first responding to the emotional register of a prognosis question (validating feeling and establishing trust and psychological safety) before addressing its informational content, since content delivered without established safety fails to be retained. When content is then given, best practice favors a patient-centered, shared decision-making model that elicits the patient's values and goals, communicates curability status (curative versus stabilization/shrinkage intent), and expresses prognosis as a qualitative range (e.g., a best-case, worst-case, and most-likely scenario, or an order-of-magnitude timeframe) rather than a single point estimate, in recognition of the documented unreliability of individual physician prognostication.
In oncology communication practice, disclosing a poor prognosis to a patient is governed by a two-stage framework: first responding to the emotional register of a prognosis question (validating feeli…