Posted by Michael Wonder on 04 Sep 2017
Bargaining with cancer patients about treatment
2 September 2017 - Doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center borrowed negotiating tactics from Harvard Business School.
When a doctor and a patient discuss treatments, is it a conversation or a negotiation?
Surgeons at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York are enlisting techniques taught at Harvard Business School to advise men facing tough decisions about prostate cancer.
Behfar Ehdaie liked giving his prostate-cancer patients hopeful news: While they had a low-grade version of the illness, they wouldn’t need immediate treatment, let alone major surgery. Instead, they could be monitored through a process known as active surveillance. But Dr. Ehdaie, a surgeon at Sloan Kettering, found that many men insisted on having radical surgery or radiation—treatments that sometimes had devastating side effects.
