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8 March 2006

Koppaka Foundation Lecture
The Meaning of "Everything":
Responding to Patient Requests
for Aggressive Treatment at the End of Life

James A. Tulsky, M.D., Center for Palliative Care, Duke University

How should physicians and other health professionals handle the challenges that arise when patients and families request aggressive interventions at the end of life that do not seem, to those health care providers, to be in the patients' best interests? This program examines reasons behind such conflicts as well as communication techniques to assist with their negotiation.


James Tulsky is Director of the Center for Palliative Care and Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University. He is  also a member of the leadership team for the Institute on Care at the End of Life. Dr. Tulsky received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, completed his  medical degree at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago in 1987, and received his internal medicine training at the University of California, San  Francisco (UCSF). He continued at UCSF as chief medical resident and subsequently as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. In 1993, he joined the faculty of Duke University. He was  in the first cohort of the Project on Death in America Soros Faculty Scholars, and is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physicians Faculty Scholars Award, a VA Health Services Research Career Development Award, and most recently the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest national award given by the White House Office of Science and Technology for early career investigators.
            Dr. Tulsky has a longstanding interest in doctor-patient communication and quality of life at the end of life, and has published widely in these areas. His current research focuses on the evaluation and enhancement of communication between oncologists and patients with advanced cancer, identification of clinical, psychosocial and spiritual trajectories of patients at the end of life, and developing tools to use with patients and family members to measure quality of life at the end of life.