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Beyond Empathy
- Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 51, Number 3, Summer 2008
- pp. 471-478
- 10.1353/pbm.0.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
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.