Patients with life-threatening conditions often change their attitudes to life, hopefully for the better. However, if you discovered destructive lifestyle changes, how would you get involved?

"Such behavior is bigger than just Oncology. Therefore, I would enlist the help of an appropriate counselor--social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist--with an additional safeguard: I would make sure it included family therapy, because often the most objective opinions about the patient's behavior come from loved ones; it also provides encouragement to do the right thing from persons the patient may actually listen to."

The pithy adage, 'Cancer cures smoking,' means to say that bad habits continue until the psychodynamics of appreciating one's mortality give the added strength needed to re-appraise lifestyles for adjustments. This is a procrastination of least resistance, and there always seems to be time in the future to stop bad habits. However, when the time of danger becomes 'the present,' there are many reasons persons continue--even accelerate--their self-destructive habits, and the interviewer wants to know you consider the mindset of a person facing mortality as different from others.

"The concept of mortality is existential, and usually the first realization of a person's future death is life-changing. If this were to cause someone to go off kilter and jeopardize my therapeutic plan with behavior that was counterproductive, I would involve the assistance of psychological services in tandem with my own therapeutic strategies, simply, because whatever they're doing is based on a different disease."