Opinion
In medicine, emphasis should be on compassion and less so on empathy
LETTER — Posted April 14, 2008
Regarding "Students lose empathy for patients during medical school" (Article, March 24/31): The article uses the terms empathy and compassion as if they were interchangeable. While they are certainly related concepts, there is a critical difference.
Empathy involves putting yourself in someone else's place and imagining how that person must feel. Compassion, on the other hand, may be defined as awareness and nonjudgmental understanding of the suffering of others combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce such suffering.
It is compassion that is the essence of good clinical medicine: The drive to alleviate suffering based upon keen awareness and deep understanding of the patient, his values and life situation, and his illness, nonjudgmentally applied. It is compassion that medical schools should try to promote. Communication skills are a prerequisite for understanding the patient and for helping the patient understand his situation and become a partner in reducing his suffering.
Empathy is actually counterproductive in more than small amounts. Entering too much into the feelings of someone who is suffering and feeling their pain along with them is not a good thing for the doctor. Learning to control and reduce empathy is a necessary psychological adaptation to dealing with others' suffering. Trying to increase empathy (in contrast to compassion) will lead only to increased physician burnout. Too much empathy even may lead to poor medical care when appropriate treatment increases suffering in the short term.
Compassion makes for better physicians. More than a little empathy does not.
David B. Cook, MD, Indianapolis
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/04/14/edlt0414.htm.
