Interaction with Cancer Patients: Psychological Impact of Doctors’ Communication Behaviour

Psychiatric morbidity can be regarded as closely related to health status and quality of life among cancer patients. Communication between oncologists and cancer patients seems to play an important role in psychological difficulties that can arise during the diagnosis and treatment phase of cancer, such as uncertainty, anxiety, depression and problems with coping. Qualitative researches done earlier, confirms that how cancer patients perceive their relationship with physician, generally affects their psychological well being which ultimately influences their short term and long term health outcomes. This paper presented an extensive review on the significance of physicians’ communication behaviour which revealed the complex relationship of doctor-patient communication and reinforces the practice implications of the former reviews. It was concluded that instead of focusing on different types of communication behaviours as separate entities, future researches should adopt an integrated approach toward the understanding of the doctor patient communication to get a clearer picture of psychological and health outcome in cancer patients.