Dear Editor- in chief Sudan Journal of Medical Sciences, Dear authors, Subject: Breaking Bad News for Patients with Gastro-Intestinal Malignancy: Experience at Ibn Sina Teaching Hospital

摘要

I read the recent article by Elsiddek et al, regarding Breaking Bad News for Patients with GastroIntestinal Malignancy: Experience at Ibn Sina Teaching Hospital with great interest1, evaluating prospectively the communication skills for breaking bad news and to find out the patients’ responses on that matter in 113 patients Sudanese patients suffering of gastrointestinal cancer. They concluded that Sympathy over-ride empathy in communicating bad news to Sudanese patients. Indeed, this study is one of the few descriptive data on breaking bad news2 and is the first study to document the trend of breaking bad news to Sudanese patients suffering from malignancies. It showed clearly that withholding the truth from patients with cancer appears common in Sudan. The author mentioned that only 25% of patients were told truth about their diagnosis and this comparable to finding of similar studies in countries where truth disclosure is not a common practice. In Saudi Arabia 75% of physicians preferred to discuss information with close relatives rather than patients themselves3.