Does empathy matter?

As a psychologist, this is no surprise to me, but medical schools and physicians’ residency training programs are concluding that empathy (understanding the patient’s perspective and effectively communicating that understanding to him or her), in fact, matters quite a bit.

Programs Aimed At Equipping Doctors With Empathy See Yielding Results.

In a nearly 1,650-word piece, Kaiser Health News Share to FacebookShare to Twitter (3/13) reports efforts to teach doctors about empathy is yielding results, citing the example of a Jeremy Force, a first-year oncology fellow at Duke University Medical Center. Force put into practice what he learned in “‘Oncotalk,’ a course required of Duke’s oncology fellows,” consequently earning praise from a patient suffering from breast cancer. The article notes “clinical empathy was once dismissively known as ‘good bedside manner’ and traditionally regarded as far less important than technical acumen.” However, “a spate of studies in the past decade” has come to the conclusion that “it is no mere frill,” and empathy “is considered essential to establishing trust, the foundation of a good doctor-patient relationship.”


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