But as Ehdaie interacted with patients, he wasn’t asking the most important questions. He wasn’t asking patients what mattered to them. He wasn’t asking: Did they want to extend their lives if the treatment robbed them of things like travel and sex? Would you want an extra five years of life if the trade-off was constant pain? How much of someone’s decision depended on their own desires versus what their family wanted? Was the patient secretly hoping the doctor would just tell him what to do? Ehdaie’s biggest mistake was assuming, at the start of a conversation, that he knew what the patient
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