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Death is one of the major taboos of contemporary Western society and is a forbidden and avoided subject. If in the past it was a public and domestic event, nowadays it is hidden in hospitals crowded with professionals who are unprepared to deal with issues related to the end of life. This unpreparedness is a reflex of excessively technical and non-humanistic training which favors healing over caring. Therefore, it seems medical students are taught to work against death and not with it. In this context, we sought to trace the profile of attitudes towards death of the students graduating from the Medicine course of a public university in Brazil and evaluate how this course has prepared them to deal with issues of death and dying in their perception. We employed quantitative and qualitative methodologies by applying two data collection instruments: a questionnaire to collect sociodemographic and academic data as well as data on the teaching about death, and another to define the profile of attitudes towards death (DAP-R). We analyzed the studied variables descriptively using frequencies and means, and intercorrelated them to infer the hypotheses. We also considered student statements for analysis and discussion of results based on comments on the responses to one of the questionnaires. As results, we observed that the students’ attitude towards death was characterized by a view of death as a natural event of life (neutral acceptance), while their imagination about death was permeated with conflicting feelings; that most students had experienced the death of a patient during the course (75.8%) although most of those received no guidance in these situations (80%); that the humanistic courses concentrated the approaches on death; and that such approaches somewhat contributed to create reflection and develop abilities for managing death. We concluded that teaching about death and dying is still concentrated in few courses of the medical curriculum, mainly in the humanistic ones, and is excessively theoretical, whereas the real experiences with death during the Medicine course are treated with detachment and silence when they could be better utilized for teaching and learning about the end of life.

Perceptions, Attitudes, and Teaching about Death and Dying in the Medical School of the Federal University of Acre, Brazil