Oct 31, 2025
My guest is Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative-care physician and
author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour.
We talk about what it really means to care for patients when cure
is no longer the goal, why our medical system resists honest
conversations about death, and how clarity and compassion can
coexist at the end of life.
Topics we cover:
• What palliative care really provides (beyond
hospice)
• Why “more treatment” ≠ “more life”
• Prognosis, probabilities, and telling the truth
kindly
• How families can ask the right questions
• Documentation that matters (and what to avoid)
• The moral distress of clinicians
• Cultural/faith factors that shape decisions
• Dignity, autonomy, and realistic hope
Guest Bio:
Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the
University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, where she is
the Director of the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. She has
written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic,
among other publications. She is the author of That Good Night:
Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed
literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative
medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what
it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness.