the attitudes of brain cancer patients and their caregivers towards death and dying a qualitative study脑癌病人和他们的照顾者的态度对待死亡和垂死的定性研究.pdfVIP

BMC Palliative Care BioMed Central Research article Open Access The attitudes of brain cancer patients and their caregivers towards death and dying: a qualitative study Nir Lipsman†1, Abby Skanda†1, Jonathan Kimmelman†2 and Mark Bernstein*†1 Address: 1Division of Neurosurgery, Toronto Western Hospital, 399 Bathurst Street, 4W451, Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2S8, Canada and 2Medical Bioethics Unit, McGill University, 3647 Peel Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1X1, Canada Email: Nir Lipsman - nlipsman@; Abby Skanda - askanda@uhnresearch.ca; Jonathan Kimmelman - jonathan.kimmelman@mcgill.ca; Mark Bernstein* - mark.bernstein@uhn.on.ca * Corresponding author †Equal contributors Published: 8 November 2007 Received: 5 June 2007 Accepted: 8 November 2007 BMC Palliative Care 2007, 6:7 doi:10.1186/1472-684X-6-7 This article is available from: /1472-684X/6/7 © 2007 Lipsman et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Much money and energy has been spent on the study of the molecular biology of malignant brain tumours. However, little attention has been paid to the wishes of patients afflicted with these incurable tumours, and how this might influence treatment considerations. Methods: We interviewed 29 individuals – 7 patients dying of a malignant brain tumor and 22