The Power of Videos in Palliative Care

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Angelo E. Volandes, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and hospitalist at Massachusetts General Hospital, had a patient named Helen Thompson. Thompson, an English professor and Walt Whitman scholar, had metastatic cancer. Her diagnosis was terminal, yet no one had had “the conversation” with her, Volandes recalled.“She looked at me with those eyes, and many of you know what eyes I’m talking about. So, what could I do?” he asked at the inaugural Ronald I. Ottenberg, M.D., Memorial Lecture in mid-April. “I started having the conversation with her: ‘Professor, I think it’s time we have a forest-from-the-trees perspective. I think we need to know the risks and benefits of all these procedures, and I need to know where you are in your journey.”
The journey, he explained, includes understanding what treatments are really like — and whether the patient would prefer to pursue them or move forward with an end-of-life plan. It’s an approach that the lecture’s namesake, Ronald Ottenberg, M.D. ’59, B.A. ’56, would have supported.
Ottenberg, a long-time practitioner of orthopedic medicine, devoted himself to caring for his patients, said Danielle Doberman, M.D. ’00, M.P.H., assistant professor of medicine at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He even completed a living will for himself, she said, which he kept in the hospital with him during his final days.
“[Our team] used it to guide us as we and the family listened to his wishes,” she explained. “We were … struck by how much his family clearly loved him and how doggedly they supported him, embracing his efforts to balance quality-of-life goals with curative efforts.” The family continues to further Ottenberg’s objectives, now through the lecture series.
“This endowed lecture … speaks to their commitment to ensuring the voices of frail and fragile patients ...

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