Clinician Self-Disclosure in Palliative Care: Describing a Taxonomy and Proposing a Communication Tool

Abstract

While patient self-disclosure is expected and necessary in the clinical setting, clinicians generally minimize their own self-disclosure, a practice largely guided by the boundaries of the fiduciary relationship. At the same time, many clinicians can recall a time when they made a self-disclosure to a patient, and it seemed to benefit the treatment relationship, if not the treatment itself. We reviewed literature from a variety of fields describing opinions, theories and limited data about the effects of clinician self-disclosure. Based on our findings, we posit that clinician self-disclosure has the potential to be a beneficial communication tool in palliative medicine, but like any intervention, it is not without risks. Thus, we propose a potential strategy to guide clinicians in thinking about self-disclosures.