End-of-Life University Ep. 511 Being with Dying: Teaching Death to Medical Students with Kevin Dieter MD
Learn about innovative educational programs for medical students and the impact they are having.
My special guest Dr. Kevin Dieter is a family medicine and hospice and palliative care physician who helped to develop the nationally recognized palliative care curriculum at Northeast Ohio Medical University. He created a virtual learning module called “Being with Dying” for medical and pharmacy students to teach them what they need to know to be at the bedside of a dying patient. He discusses the course he offers, including training healthcare providers. Learn more from his website:
This episode includes:
- How Kevin first learned about end-of-life care from his patient “Mary”
- How Kevin went from being a family doctor to a hospice doctor
- The value of exposing medical students to dying patients
- 3 Pillars of wisdom:
- dying are our teachers both directly and indirectly
- we are the medicine for patients in our presence
- dying is more than a medical event
- How he helped initiate a learning experience called “The Hospice Patient as Teacher” for 3rd year medical students
- How patients don’t want their physician to “run away” when they are dying
- The power of home visits for patients
- What “Being with Dying” consists of
- Why this course can be replicated by other programs
- Why he no longer talks about “good” or “bad” deaths
- How Kevin became an Anam Cara
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Sacred Art of Living Program
- Check out my Substack: Soulcode – where I share essays on AI, grief, shadow work, and spiritual reflection
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- NEW Gift Guides for Caregivers, People Receiving Care, and People Who are Grieving
- Get my two newest books!! Stories from the Dark Night and The Tao of Death
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- Conversations on Death with ChatGPT – Audiobook here; Print Book here
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