Stories Have The Power to Transform End-of-Life Care
As an ICU and Palliative Care physician, Dr. Zitter’s writing offers an insider’s perspective on the public health crisis that touches us all: people dying badly.
Dr. Zitter is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Huffington Post, and her writing also has appeared in The Atlantic, Time, Journal of the American Medical Association, and many other media.
She is the author of the newly released Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life, which serves as a practical guide for engaging in the radical honesty, authentic communication, and vibrant collaboration needed to improve end-of-life care for all.
Selected Articles
Most Recent Articles
The Society for Participatory Medicine: “It’s Time to Acknowledge the Invisible Caregivers Among Us”
By Jessica Zitter I received an uncharacteristically anxious text from my friend Aileen: “I am having an emergency with my Mom. Please call ASAP.” When I last talked to Aileen, her mother’s dementia had been [...]
JAMA: Hummingbird Lessons
By Jessica Zitter It took me a while to notice the hummingbird. She must have flown by my window 5 or 6 times before registering in my peripheral vision. When I finally looked up, [...]
The Hollywood Reporter: A Doctor (and Doc-Short Filmmaker) Explains How COVID Created Solutions for Patients and Producers
After 'Caregiver: A Love Story' wrapped in March 2020, Dr. Jessica Zitter — who co-directed the short with Kevin Gordon — the world "shut down" and the duo feared the work would never see the [...]
Replace the ‘cold steel’ of hospital-bed shackles with the warmth of compassion
Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in STAT “Why do they have that cold steel on my son’s ankle?” The father of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was newly paralyzed from the waist down, wanted [...]
The Evolution of the Robot Doctor
Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in The New York Times In March 2019, a robot entered a patient’s room in California and a doctor on its screen told him and his granddaughter that he was dying. [...]
Coronavirus Experience Shows The Limits of Hospital Care
My friend Jim called me with urgency in his voice; his elderly father, living alone in New York City during the peak of the pandemic, had a multiday fever and was losing weight. He wanted [...]
Covid or No Covid, It’s Important to Plan
By Jessica Nutik Zitter, M.D. April 16, 2020 My phone rang with a FaceTime video, and my cousin’s face popped into view. We spent the first few minutes expressing our mutual disbelief and shock over Covid-19, [...]
The Never-Ending Mistreatment of Black Patients
My patient would never breathe on his own again, but he didn’t know it yet. Years of smoking landed him in our emergency room several times a month. Now the only thing lying between him and [...]
How Storytelling Can Help Young Doctors Become More Resilient
Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH Harvard Business Review I recently stood in front of a group of emergency room residents at my hospital and asked an unusual question. “Has any of you ever judged [...]
What’s ignored in the debate over aid in dying
This undated photo provided by the Maynard family shows Brittany Maynard. The terminally ill California woman moved to Portland, Ore., to take advantage of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, which was established in the [...]
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ENJOYING THE ARTICLES?
If so, you’ll enjoy her newly released book, Extreme Measures. It weaves patient stories into the fabric of a broader perspective: the social, societal, and psychological factors of how end-of-life plays out in our current medical culture.