Empathy in Patient Care Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and O
Empathy has long been recognized as a key element of the healing professions. Yet it is not always clear how to define the concept, how to measure it, whether there are effective methods to enhance empathy , or whether empathy really helps make treatment
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Mohammadreza Hojat, Ph.D.
Empathy in Patient Care Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes
Mohammadreza Hojat Center for Research in Medical Education and Health Care Jefferson Medical College 1025 Walnut Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107 [email protected]
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006924590 ISBN-13: 978-0-387-33607-7 ISBN-10: 0-387-33607-9
e-ISBN-13: 978-0-387-33608-4 e-ISBN-10: 0-387-33608-7
Printed on acid-free paper. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com
In dedication to those who devote their professional lives to understanding human suffering, eliminating pain, eradicating disease and infirmity, curing human illnesses, and improving the physical, mental, and social well-being of their fellow human beings.
Foreword Empathy for me has always been a feeling “almost magical” in medical practice, one that brings passion with it, more than vaunted equanimity. Empathy is the projection of feelings that turn I and you into I am you, or at least I might be you. Empathy grows with living and experience. More than a neurobiological response, it brings feelings with it. Empathy helps us to know who we are and keeps us physicians from sterile learned responses. Originally the emotion generated by an image, empathy began as an aesthetic concept, one that should have meaning for medical practices now become so visual. Empathy comes in many different guises. Empathy can be looking out on the world from the same perspective as that of the patient: to understand your patients better, sit down beside them, to look out at the world from their perspective. But empathy can be far more, therapeutic even, when physicians try to help their sick patients. As a gastroenterologist, I have always been interested in what people feel, more than in what their gut looks like. When the flexible endoscopes began to change our vision in the 1960s, I gave up doing “procedures.” Taking care of patients with dyspepsia or diarrhea up to that time had been a cognitive task: We deduced what might be seen from what our patients told us. Fortunately for our confidence, few instruments tested the truth of what we thought. The endoscopes I disdained proved forerunners of more discerning apparatus that now makes it easy for physicians to “see” an abno
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