The Conversation

In The Conversation, Harvard Medical School physician Angelo Volandes offers a solution that is medicine’s oldest and least technological tool in the proverbial black bag: talking. If doctors explain options—including the choice to forgo countless medical interventions that are often of little benefit in patients with advanced illness—then patients can tell doctors how they wish to spend the remainder of their lives. Through the stories of seven patients and seven very different end-of-life experiences, Volandes explores the trajectory of events and treatments that occur with and without this essential conversation.