This thread explores the role of ethics and empathy in medicine, debating whether cold logic or emotional connection is more beneficial in medical practice. Participants discuss the implications of empathy and sympathy in patient care, ethical dilemmas, and decision-making processes within the medical field.
Participants express differing views on the necessity and impact of empathy and sympathy in medicine. There is no consensus on whether empathy should play a role in medical decision-making, and the discussion remains unresolved regarding the balance between emotional connection and logical reasoning.
Participants highlight various assumptions about the definitions of empathy and sympathy, as well as the implications of emotional involvement in medical practice. The discussion reflects a range of perspectives on ethical principles and their application in healthcare scenarios.
Giles said:There are degrees of approaches to patient care: empathy, sympathy, objectivity and cruelty.
I think the character House tends to employ the latter when dealing with a patient’s emotional wellbeing, often resorting to sarcasm and contempt; but he uses objectivity when deciding which treatment would be most beneficial to their physical health.
Emotional wellbeing and physical health are inextricably linked, so it seems logical to appeal positively to both aspects of a patient’s welfare.
greghouse said:Might be true, but then exactly what are they doing that the other "not caring therefor stupid incompetent" doctor doesn't? And with that question I mean litterally do they visit the patient more often? Administer more drugs ( or placeboes) etc. Every type of action has to be broken down to its smallest parts, and then every doctor learns to do this, why he's doing it, and what effects it has if he doesn't do it. Problem solved.
Empathy in it self doesn't heal patients, it's its consequenses that up the odds. And these consequenses can be done without the empathy. QED
greghouse said:You can fake it without it being noticed. Many people for instance can't tell wheter someone has Aspergers or not. As you know, Aspergers is a milder form of autism, and the sufferers (blessed ones) don't have the empathy ability at all, or very little. Nevertheless they learn how to act, and though somewhat odd to their behaviour sometimes, it usually goes by unnoticed that they don't empathize.
To find these clues you have not only to look for them, but also know what you're looking for, which most people definitely don't.
baywax said:Compassion and empathy create the natural curiosity and motivation in a person to find the best solution to a situation.
Don't mistake empathy with emotion. Empathy is the use of ones abilities to understand the basic effects of a situation on a patient's physical and psychological well being. When empathy delves into how the emotions of a patient feel, that is SYMPATHY which is not as constructive or as effective in treating a condition. Sympathy might be seen as a bottleneck in one's care of another because it causes one to pause, lament and feel as overwhelmed as one's subject in the face of what might be poor odds.
baywax said:Empathy is a learned trait. If it has not been demonstrated well in early childhood, it will be more difficult to learn. But, one can train to be empathic... and to their advantage.
greghouse said: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.
(emphasis added)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”
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).
greghouse said:First, no way you can simply "degree" patient care like that.
As pointed out before, empathy and sympathy are completely different.
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.
baywax said: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.