MY mother died of breast cancer in 2005 after living with the disease for nearly 20 years. Her oncologist, whom I knew from the time I was 9 years old, was her doctor for most of that time. I practically grew up in the hospital, and my family felt quite close to the health care providers, especially the oncologist. After my mother died I wondered if the feeling was mutual.

Do doctors grieve when their patients die? In the medical profession, such grief is seldom discussed — except, perhaps, as an example of the sort of emotion that a skilled doctor avoids feeling. But in a paper published on Tuesday in Archives of Internal Medicine (and in a forthcoming paper in the journal Death Studies), my colleagues and I report what we found in our research about oncologists and patient loss: Not only do doctors experience grief, but the professional taboo on the emotion also has negative consequences for the doctors themselves, as well as for the quality of care they provide.

Our study took place from 2010 to 2011 in three Canadian hospitals. We recruited and interviewed 20 oncologists who varied in age, sex and ethnicity and had a wide range of experience in the field — from a year and a half in practice in the case of oncology fellows to more than 30 years in the case of senior oncologists. Using a qualitative empirical method known as grounded theory, we analyzed the data by systematically coding each interview transcript line by line for themes and then comparing the findings from each interview across all interviews to see which themes stood out most robustly.

We found that oncologists struggled to manage their feelings of grief with the detachment they felt was necessary to do their job. More than half of our participants reported feelings of failure, self-doubt, sadness and powerlessness as part of their grief experience, and a third talked about feelings of guilt, loss of sleep and crying.