Emotional Attunement vs. Detached Concern: A Case for Real Empathy in Medicine
- Time Pressure
- Communication Barriers
- Compassion Fatigue
- Managing Expectations
In this landmark article, psychiatrist and bioethicist Dr. Jodi Halpern challenges the traditional medical norm of "detached concern". While physician educators often define clinical empathy as a purely cognitive skill used to label patient emotions from a distance, Halpern argues that true clinical empathy is impossible without emotional attunement.
Abstract
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.
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