How Doctors Tell Patients They're Dying

March 7, 2008 — -- Telling patients they're going to die is less dramatic than one might think, and contrary to popular belief, most doctors refuse to estimate how many weeks or months patients have left to live.

While initial reports of Patrick Swayze's pancreatic cancer diagnosis came with predictions that the star would have only five weeks to live, the actor's doctor quickly released a statement refuting the rumors.

"Patrick has a very limited amount of disease, and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far," Dr. George Fisher, Swayze's physician, said in the statement. "All the reports stating the time frame of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic."

Putting a time stamp on someone's life, several doctors told ABCNEWS.com, is something that few doctors are willing to do. Instead, they employ much more methodical and caring techniques of breaking the news to terminally ill patients.

"It's not [a doctor's] job to take away hope but to try to provide support and be realistic as possible," said Dr. Michael Grodin, the director of medical ethics at Boston University School of Medicine and Public Health. "We are notoriously bad at predicting how much time a patient has left.

"You can obviously say that if someone has metastatic cancer that it's unlikely they're going to live for years," said Grodin, who said that it's always "very tough" to tell a patient he is dying. "But then again I've seen time and time again patients living much longer [than predicted] or dying much sooner."

Many patients fear abandonment, Grodin said, so doctors must be sure to take the time to remind their terminally ill patients that even though a cure might be out of the question, their health is still important to them.

"Once they're diagnosed as terminal they worry that because we have nothing to do for them [in terms of a cure], we'll desert them," Grodin said. "So we must tell them that 'we have many wonderful things to do for you so that you don't have the pain and the suffering.'"