LibGuides: The Patient Experience: Empathy & Compassion

Books

From Detached Concern to Empathy: humanizing medical practice by Jodi Halpern
Call Number: W 62 H195f 2001
ISBN: 0195111192
Publication Date: 2001-05-10
Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy. Sympathy, according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy. How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional skills, including associating with another person's images and spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling?
Only 10 Seconds to Care: Help and Hope for Busy Clinicians by Harpham, Wendy
Call Number: W 62 O54 2009
ISBN: 1934465399
Publication Date: 2009
Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: beyond pills and the scalpel by Howard Spiro (Editor); Mary G. McCrea Curnen (Editor); Enid Peschel (Editor); Deborah St. James (Editor)
Call Number: W 62 E55 1993
ISBN: 0300066708
Publication Date: 1993
Seeking to restore empathy to medical practice, this book aims to demonstrate how important it is for doctors to listen to their patients, to experience and to understand what their patients are feeling. The book is a collection of essays by physicians, philosophers and a nurse.

Of Interest: The Importance of Empathy in Medical Care

Patient care is more than just healing -- it's building a connection that encompasses mind, body and soul.
If you could stand in someone else's shoes . . . hear what they hear. See what they see. Feel what they feel. Would you treat them differently?
CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, shared this video, titled "Empathy," with the Cleveland Clinic staff during his 2012 State of the Clinic address on Feb. 27, 2013.

Dr. Riess has devoted her career to research on the neuroscience and art of the patient-doctor relationship and teaching psychiatry residents and medical students. Her research team conducts translational research based on the neuroscience of emotions. The effectiveness of Dr. Riess's empathy training approach has been demonstrated in several studies including a randomized controlled trial. She has developed faculty curricula for "Teaching the Teachers" of Psychotherapy that is used by faculty psychiatrists. Dr. Riess's empathy training curricula are implemented internationally in healthcare as well as in business.

Title: Empathy in Critical Care.

Part of the Sub Conference: Empathy and Health Care

Sample Questions for the Panel:

How do you define Empathy?
Please describe your work and why the principle of empathy is relevant to it.
The theory of Counter-Transference in Psychology postulates that the practitioner's feelings are entangled with the patient's. Does this also happen in the medical field?
How is compassion related to empathy in your professional opinion?
What are the differences and are both necessary in medical care or in your work otherwise?
How do those providing objective medical care, especially around the grim subject of one's own death, provide compassionate care without absorbing the emotions surrounding imminent death?
What is the difference between Sympathy and Empathy?
How does one foster and nurture empathy within the context of your work?

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