Open AccessWhat is Clinical Empathy?
Author(s) -
Halpern Jodi
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
journal of general internal medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.746
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 1525-1497
pISSN - 0884-8734
DOI - 10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.21017.x
Subject(s) - empathy , attunement , meaning (existential) , medicine , cognition , psychotherapist , psychology , psychiatry , alternative medicine , pathology
Patients seek empathy from their physicians. Medical educators increasingly recognize this need. Yet in seeking to make empathy a reliable professional skill, doctors change the meaning of the term. Outside the field of medicine, empathy is a mode of understanding that specifically involves emotional resonance. In contrast, leading physician educators define empathy as a form of detached cognition. In contrast, this article argues that physicians' emotional attunement greatly serves the cognitive goal of understanding patients' emotions. This has important implications for teaching empathy.