Academic Medicine Podcast

Medical practitioners of all specialties may lack Cassandra’s divinely inspired prophetic powers, but our training, research, and deep consideration for our patients’ wellbeing inform our prognostication. We hope that in this way, we are able to serve as guideposts along their ultimate paths. Judy Ch’ang, medical director of the Neurointensive Care Unit and assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Unit at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Nara Michaelson, a fourth-year neurology resident at Weill Cornell Medicine, reflect on how difficult it is for physicians to explain the intricacies of prognostication to patients’ family members. The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the November 2022 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.