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Review
. 2003 Aug;18(8):670-4.
doi: 10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.21017.x.

What is clinical empathy?

Jodi Halpern  1
Affiliations
Review

What is clinical empathy?

Jodi Halpern. J Gen Intern Med. 2003 Aug.

Abstract

Patients seek empathy from their physicians. Medical educators increasingly recognize this need. Yet in seeking to make empathy a reliable professional skill, doctors change the meaning of the term. Outside the field of medicine, empathy is a mode of understanding that specifically involves emotional resonance. In contrast, leading physician educators define empathy as a form of detached cognition. In contrast, this article argues that physicians' emotional attunement greatly serves the cognitive goal of understanding patients' emotions. This has important implications for teaching empathy.

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