How should family members cope with cancer patients?

  Many family members ask Dr. Liu, as the patient’s dependent, how they should strengthen nutrition and pay for the patient during the treatment. In fact, at such a special stage, Dr. Liu feels that family members should be more concerned about the patient’s psychological problems. Family members always feel that they have been very distressed by the patient during the process of accompanying him/her to receive treatment, but why is it that whatever they say and do is wrong and resistant? This is the time to move a theory of psychology, so that the family can understand the patient’s psychological state, in order to target to help the patient through the psychological process. When a person learns the bad news of having a disease, he or she tends to go through the following five stages of psychological changes: 1) denial, 2) anger, 3) confusion, 4) despair, and 5) acceptance. Obviously, the faster a patient enters the fifth stage, the better he or she can cooperate with the standard treatment. Therefore, family members should first assess the patient’s psychological state, then slowly guide the patient’s psychological direction, put themselves in the patient’s shoes, and finally help the patient reach the stage of acceptance.