Creating Empathic Physicians

Michael Blumenfield writes in Psychiatric Times:

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand what they are feeling. This is something that psychiatrists try to do in our everyday work. Those of us who have worked in medical schools have struggled with the question of whether or not we can teach this to young men and women who are learning to be doctors or whether it is something that they either have or do not have. Certainly I have seen medical students who seemed to be decidedly lacking in this quality, just as I have seen students to whom it came very naturally and some who were far more empathic than I was as a student or even after years of experience.

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