Ethics & Empathy in Medicine: Cold Logic or Warm Heart?

[baywax]

OK this is just plain crap. What you speak of is sympathy. The difference between sympathy and empathy is that you learn sympathy, but you can't learn empathy.

Next you'll be BS'ing me that solving a math problem is a genetic trait.

Empathy is a learned ability.

The Study of Cognitive Empathy and Empathic Accuracy

Besides a growing interest in person perception among psychologists in the 1950's (e.g., Heider (1958)), researchers from the counseling and therapeutic milieu were keen on investigating empathic accuracy, since empathy was seen as being essential for successful therapy.

In conceiving of a client centered therapy, Rogers defines empathy early on as the ability to “ perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ conditions”

(emphasis added)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/cognitive.html

Empathy is highly dependent upon imagination and, as far as I know, imagination is something that must be exercised and trained before it becomes an ability like empathy.

Dymond's (1949) influential “scale for rating empathic ability” can be used to illustrate this fact. (For other methods of measuring empathic accuracy see Taft 1955, Davis and Kraus 1997)). Dymond defined empathy in the tradition of Rogers as the “imaginative transposing of oneself into the thinking, feeling, and acting of another person and so structuring the world as he does” (1949, 127).

Perhaps you are confusing the fact that having a brain is a genetically predetermined condition with the fact that you must use your brain to gain an empathic understanding of a subject.

 

[Giles]

First, no way you can simply "degree" patient care like that.

Sure you can. Some Drs are very empathetic in certain situations (due to having similar experiences), some can empathize a little (if they have a relatively minor understanding of the experience), some may feel varying degrees of sympathy (usually attributed to a natural tendency, I imagine), some are able to remain objective (whether they feel sympathy or not), and some are just pitiless and cruel (also probably due to a natural tendency, and greatly dependent on their dislike for a patient).

As pointed out before, empathy and sympathy are completely different.

And what about my post made you think I considered them the same thing?

Objectivity is something (which Iv'e been trying to say all along) every doctor should try to achieve at the expence of empathy, which tends to compromise it.

I disagree that objectivity is always the best approach when dealing with a patient's emotional wellbeing (i.e. particularly in the case of delivering bad news). Why would you say "fake it" if you don't think sympathy has a place in patient care to begin with? Wouldn't that be redundant?
By its very definition you can’t fake empathy. However, you can pretend to be sympathetic, but not everyone has the capacity to be convincing.

Regardless, empathy and sympathy can't be turned on and off like a tap. And just having these feelings doesn't automatically mean you cannot be objective about decisions regarding appropriate treatments. In fact, I'd argue that empathy and sympathy would predispose one to take the best option available...

By the way, when people decide to enter into medical school they often site there reasons for this decision as “I want to help people.”….

Which sounds suspiciously like they may be entertaining feelings of sympathy :)

 

[greghouse]

Next you'll be BS'ing me that solving a math problem is a genetic trait.

Empathy is highly dependent upon imagination and, as far as I know, imagination is something that must be exercised and trained before it becomes an ability like empathy.

Perhaps you are confusing the fact that having a brain is a genetically predetermined condition with the fact that you must use your brain to gain an empathic understanding of a subject.

No I won't, but your ability to do it better or worse, is mainly inherited, since men do it better than women.

I didn't see your linked article mension anywhere that empathy is a learned treat. Give me your differentiation between empathy and sympathy.

Besides, empathy has been linked to areas in the brain containg mirror-neurons. Women show more mirror-neural activity than men, and autist show even lower. Mirror neurons are active at birth, why macaque have been known to imitate behaviour at baby-age.

 

[Evo]

This thread is going nowhere. Closed.