What’s Empathy Got to do With It?

In recent years, the field of medicine has started stressing the importance of medical students being well versed in taking care of patients not only on the health level, but on the emotional level as well. It’s no longer solely about how well you can memorize facts or perform a procedure. You now have to be able to get on an emotional level, too. Now there is evidence that helping cure a patient isn’t just about handing them a prescription; one has to be able to connect with them.

An article came out claiming that patients who have more empathetic doctors are more likely to have a better outcome. But, before we talk about empathy, the definition of it needs to be made clear. In his lecture, Decety defined empathy as feeling concern for other people or knowing what the other is thinking or feeling. The article focuses that definition within the context of doctor-patient relationships and describes it as “understanding [the] patient’s concerns, pain and suffering, and an intention to help”. When Decety was discussing empathy in clinical practice, he acknowledged that, understandably, it is challenging for doctors and nurses to be empathetic because they deal with the most emotionally distressing situations. In some cases, they even have to inflict pain as part of the healing process. Of course, there are some benefits to not showing empathy. For example, it frees up processing capacities to be of assistance to the patient. Furthermore, the doctor won’t have to suffer from compassion fatigue. Nevertheless, it does have its losses. It can result in poor rapport with the patients. The doctor or nurse can also end up filtering out emotional information, which would be bad because while the patient is saying words, body movements can also be telling of a patient’s condition in ways they might not be able to describe. Conclusively, too little, and even too much, empathetic arousal can be detrimental to the medical practitioners well being and in turn, effect the patient as well.

The article builds on Decety’s lecture by providing solid evidence that, as mentioned earlier, patients who have doctors that are more empathetic have better outcomes. The study included over 20,000 diabetic patients and over 240 physicians in Italy. In order to measure the empathy of the doctors, researchers used the Jefferson Scale of Empathy. Researches then connected it with their patients and found that there was a “direct association between a higher physician JSE score and a better control of patients hemoglobin A1c and cholesterol level.” Furthermore, physicians that had a higher empathy score had “a lower rate of patients with acute metabolic complications.” The study proved to be a very reliable one. For example, the universal health care coverage in Italy made socioeconomic status irrelevant and they were able to have a variety of patients because of that. This study really contributes to this new attitude towards what qualities doctors really need in order to be successful, which does include being well versed in the sciences, but now also includes being able to have a relationship with their patients.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120910111708.htm#.ULzua35lR-U.email