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From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice
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 how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling?
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 how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling?
115 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 2001
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March 12, 2014
This is a great and important book. Halpern is a psychiatrist, so she does use some language and concepts from psychology that may alienate some readers, but if you ignore the references to Frood and his heirs, you will find a call to arms that is theoretically sophisticated and humanly compelling. Halpern argues that the model of the emotionally detached physician is not just alienating to patients but bad for diagnosis and treatment, the areas that proponents of emotional detachment were attempting to protect from irrationality. She's absolutely correct.
Halpern also develops, albeit a little more implicitly, a compelling critique of the autonomy paradigm that has been regnant in American medicine since the rise of bioethics as a discipline. She describes, again without using this precise language, a model of the physician as an intellectually curious guide through the process of illness that helps patients see themselves through their illness and acquire the hope and perspective to find meaning in and through the setbacks they confront during illness and treatment.
Halpern has helped my practice of situational awareness in navigating the human experience of the ICU with patients and families and has expanded my theoretical base. Strongly recommended for intellectually curious physicians.
Halpern also develops, albeit a little more implicitly, a compelling critique of the autonomy paradigm that has been regnant in American medicine since the rise of bioethics as a discipline. She describes, again without using this precise language, a model of the physician as an intellectually curious guide through the process of illness that helps patients see themselves through their illness and acquire the hope and perspective to find meaning in and through the setbacks they confront during illness and treatment.
Halpern has helped my practice of situational awareness in navigating the human experience of the ICU with patients and families and has expanded my theoretical base. Strongly recommended for intellectually curious physicians.
Displaying 1 of 1 review