Finalist (folio) eddie award for best column in healthcare 2019 and 2020
winner (folio) eddie award 2016
Since 2005, Dr. Harpham has been writing the View From the Other Side of the Stethscope column, short essays on common dilemmas in patient care. Each column offers insights on challenges patients face and tips for helping patients overcome them.
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Recent columns
Healing Gifts of Grateful Patients (forthcoming November 25, 2023)
The Problem of Salvage Therapy for Patients Who Fail Treatment
Select Patient Handouts [More complete list at Patient Handouts : Oncology Times ]
Answering “How are you?” Underrstanding why this common question can seem complicated and knowing how to answer helps patients get good care and live as fully as possible.
The Healing Power of the “Survivor” Label With “survivor” the accepted label in oncology, patients benefit from perceiving the term in healing ways
Tips for Contacting Us To obtain optimal care, it helps to know whether, when, and how to contact the medical team.
Managing Communications with Family and Friends Insights and tips on whether, when, and how to best manage communications about your condition.
The New Normal for Now Insights and tips for creating a new normal for now that helps patients regain a sense of control and nourish hope of a better tomorrow.
Your Genetic Inheritance A Patient Handout to help patients deal with the possibility that their cancer is hereditary.
Favorite columns
Patients’ Hope for a Miracle A discussion of the issues involved in responding well to patients who say they are hoping for a miracle.
Beautiful crutches This essay offers insights and tips for helping patients overcome practical and emotional obstacles to using aids (such as canes, memory aids, hearing aids) optimally.
Why Patients Don't Bounce Back What it means to be resilient after cancer.
Healthy Survivorship and Hope
Introducing the New Normal for Now Clinicians help patients accept and adapt to their changed reality by introducing “the new normal for now,” which includes good things that come out of unwanted illness,
Book Reviews
Henry Kaplan: The Gentle GiantA series on dealing with genetic inheritance
Patients' Genetic Inheritance Book review of A Cancer in the Family by Theodora Ross, MD
My Mutation Dr. Harpham shares what it was like to learn she carried a deleterious mutation.
Your Mutation A handout to help patients deal with the news that they carry a deleterious mutation
A series on managing uncertainty
Personal Reflections
Compassion in Modern Medicine
Doctors' Condolence Notes For clinicians, this essay explains why condolence notes are not passe. For families who never received a condolence note from their loved one's physician, this offers a few explanations.
Stopping Treatment
Patient Handout: Understanding Promising Unproven Cancer Therapies A few key facts about what those therapies offer—and don't offer—to help you determine whether to consider them as options for you.
Soliloquy on a Life-and-Death Decision Get in the head of a patient making a decision about hospice vs promising-but-unproven treatment
To Try or Not to Try This essay discusses the challenges of talking about unproven new therapies such as Car-T with patients who have no standard options.
When Should Patients Stop Fighting? Healing answers for patients with advanced disease who ask, "When should I stop fighting?"
The “H” Word Introducing hospice to patients in a hopeful way.