By July 1982, Kübler-Ross had taught 125,000 students in death and dying courses in colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions.

Throughout her career, Kübler-Ross received over 100 awards, including twenty honorary degrees, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 1947, Kübler-Ross visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, an experience that profoundly affected her understanding of compassion and the resilience of the human spirit.

[citation needed] After returning to Zürich, Kübler-Ross worked for a dermatologist named Dr. Kan Zehnder at the Canton Hospital an apprentice.

[12] After this time, she worked to support herself in a variety of jobs, gaining major experience in hospitals while volunteering to provide aid to refugees.

There, Kübler-Ross worked as a junior faculty member and gave her first interview of a young terminally ill woman in front of a roomful of medical students.

She became an instructor at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, where she began to conduct a regular weekly educational seminar consisting of live interviews with terminally ill patients.

[17] In November 1969, Life magazine ran an article on Kübler-Ross, bringing public awareness to her work outside of the medical community.

[18] On August 7, 1972, she spoke to the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging to promote the "Death With Dignity" movement.

In 1978, Kübler-Ross cofounded the American Holistic Medical Association.Kübler-Ross was one of the central figures in the hospice care movement, believing that euthanasia prevents people from completing their "unfinished business".

In the late 1970s, after interviewing thousands of patients who had died and been resuscitated, she became interested in out-of-body experiences, mediumship, spiritualism, and other ways of attempting to contact the dead.

This led to a scandal connected to the Shanti Nilaya Healing Center, in which she was duped by Jay Barham, founder of the Church of the Facet of the Divinity.

The workshops provided a forum for patients to share their stories and express their fears, anger, and grief regarding their impending death.

A recurring theme in the workshops was addressing regrets associated with perceived wasted time and energy related to unresolved childhood issues such as abuse and neglect.

These unresolved issues often manifested as misplaced anger, perfectionism, controlling behavior, prioritization of material wealth over relationships, feelings of unworthiness, and a lack of meaning.

[34] A distinctive feature of the workshops was the use of impromptu crayon drawings, a technique influenced by the work of Jungian analyst Dr. Susan Bach.

Dr. Kübler-Ross instructed participants on drawing interpretation to help uncover unconscious reasons for their attendance and to address past losses.

Additionally, she presented a model of human development encompassing four parts— emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual—referred to as "The Four Quadrants," which forms the basis of her work in the beginnings of the palliative care movement.

Kübler-Ross's work was partly driven by requests from patients and readers seeking a deeper understanding of the language used by terminally ill children to articulate their needs.

[37] Influenced by the work of Susan Bach and Gregg Furth,[38] Kübler-Ross examined how children's drawings serve as a crucial means of communication.

"Nonverbal Symbolic Language" is used by younger children, who may express their understanding of death through drawings, pictures, or objects, as they might lack the verbal skills to articulate their feelings directly.

[37] As children grow older, they may transition to "Verbal Symbolic Language," characterized by complex stories and unusual questions that serve to express their emotions and concerns about death.

[40] She conducted many workshops on life, death, grief, and AIDS in different parts of the world, teaching about the disease and working to reduce the stigma surrounding it.

One of her greatest wishes was to build a hospice for abandoned infants and children infected with HIV to give them a lasting home where they could live until their death.

In October 1994, she lost her house and many possessions, including photos, journals, and notes, to an arson fire that is suspected to have been set by opponents of her AIDS work.

[47] The five-stage model has received some criticism by academics who argue against approaches that universally apply it to all bereaved groups or claim that grief should be expressed in a set number of rigidly linear stages.

"[48] Dr. Allan Kellehear responded to the critics in the 40th anniversary edition's introduction to "On Death & Dying" the following, "the so-called “stage theory” that you will read in this book is openly described and discussed as a heuristic device.

The careful reader will note Kübler-Ross’s own repeated warnings that many of these “stages” overlap, occur together, or even that some reactions are missed altogether.

She received many awards and honors during her career, including honorary degrees from various universities, and is featured in a photograph exhibit at the Virginia headquarters of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

Songs such as "Kübler-Ross" have been named after her by artists including: Matthew B Everett (2008), Chuck Wilson (2010),[59] Elephant Rifle (2010), Permute (2011), Taylor Whitelow of the Youth (2012), Dominic Moore (2015), Andy Jenkinson (2019)Alp Aybers (2020), Audio Medic (2021),[60] O SIZE (2022), Kübler-Ross the band (2020), Norro (2024),[61] and Mic Lanny & James Rock (2014).