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July 28th, 2025

Ep. 511 Being with Dying: Teaching Death to Medical Students with Kevin Dieter MD

  1. Ep. 511 Being with Dying: Teaching Death to Medical Students with Kevin Dieter MD kwyattmd 1:03:41

Learn about innovative educational programs for medical students and the impact they are having.

Ep. 511 Being With Dying: Teaching Death To Medical Students With Kevin Dieter Md &Raquo; Podcast25Dieter

My special guest Dr. Kevin Dieter is a Family medicine and Hospice and palliative care physician who helped to develop the nationally recognized palliative care curriculum at Northeast Ohio Medical University. He created a virtual learning module called “Being with Dying” for medical and pharmacy students to teach them what they need to know to be at the bedside of a dying patient. He discusses the course he offers, including training healthcare providers. Learn more from his website:

walking-home.com

Listen here:

This episode includes:

  • How Kevin first learned about end-of-life care from his patient “Mary”
  • How Kevin went from being a family doctor to a hospice doctor
  • The value of exposing medical students to dying patients
  • 3 Pillars of Wisdom:
    • dying are our teachers both directly and indirectly
    • we are the medicine for patients in our presence
    • dying is more than a medical event
  • How he helped initiate a learning experience called “The Hospice Patient as Teacher” for 3rd year medical students
  • How patients don’t want their physician to “run away” when they are dying
  • The power of home visits for patients
  • What “Being with Dying” consists of
  • Why this course can be replicated by other programs
  • Why he no longer talks about “good” or “bad” deaths
  • How Kevin became an Anam Cara

Links mentioned in this episode:

If you enjoy this content please share it with others and consider leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks again to all supporters on my page at Patreon.com/eolu, and to @yogat3ch for buying me a coffee and James Schultz who made a donation on Paypal! Your contributions make all the difference and ensure this podcast stays ad-free.

Dr. Karen Wyatt is the bestselling author of the book 7 Lessons for Living from the Dying, which contains stories of patients she cared for as a hospice doctor and the spiritual lessons she learned from them at the end of their lives. Her other books include The Journey from Ego to Soul, Stories from the Dark Night, and The Tao of Death. Dr. Wyatt also hosts End-of-Life University Podcast, which features conversations with experts who work in all aspects of end-of-life care. She is widely regarded as a thought-leader in the effort to transform the way we care for our dying in the U.S. In addition, she is valued for her application of spiritual principles to illness and healthcare and teaches that in order to live life fully we must each overcome our fear of death and embrace the difficulties that life brings us.