Alleviating existential distress of cancer patients: can relational ethics guide clinicians?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most people have a heightened awareness of death at the moment they receive a cancer diagnosis. Medical treatment attempts to demystify and manage death, yet surprisingly, care that alleviates existential distress is the least provided psychosocial care. A review of empirical research [quantitative and qualitative studies (n = 85) and seven literature reviews] was conducted to explore the experiences of clinicians (primarily nurses) working with cancer patients who experience existential distress. This paper summarizes clinicians' experiences with cancer patients who face the threat of mortality. Given that the majority of literature was found to be in nursing, emphasis in this paper tends to be on nurses' experiences. However, findings are suggested to have implications for other clinicians who deal with similar concerns. A lens of relational ethics was inductively found to organize and highlight problems and gaps that originate from interpersonal concerns. This paper describes four themes requiring further research and education related to existential distress: engagement, embodiment, environment and mutual respect. Implications for oncology care are suggested at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels to encourage clinicians to ethically respond to patients' existential distress needs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it