Beyond Empathy

Empathy is a highly desirable trait in a physician, but the term means different things to different people. Rather than focus on empathy, it may be more fruitful to consider the individual ingredients of a successful patient-physician engagement: scientific competency, imagination (the basis of empathy), caring about the patient, attentive (nonjudgmental) listening to the person’s story, and skill in rewriting the illness story. The cardinal skill, on a sound base of scientific competence, is imagination. A successful engagement has beneficial consequences for physicians as well as patients.