Conversations With Patients: A Recipe for Providing Better, More Personalized Care

The best gift a patient ever gave me was a recipe. It was handwritten on a small piece of lined paper, all in capital letters. The recipe was for zucchini bread and was given to me by Mr. S, a lung cancer survivor in his early 80s who I had been following in the cancer survivorship clinic that I started at the VA where I work in New England. He came to see me every three to six months for clinic visits and computed tomography scans to monitor for recurrence of his lung cancer.