How attentive, empathetic, and caring was your physician the last time you had to go to the doctor’s office?
Or, if you’re a physician, do you ever wonder how your patients perceive you?
We recently reported on a study that showed severity of cold symptoms decreased among patients treated by physicians who demonstrated high levels of empathy.
Empathy is a crucial skill when working with people who are sick or facing the diagnosis they most fear.
So a training program to help medical practitioners develop a greater sense of attentiveness and empathy could offer patients tremendous support and relief, no matter what they’re facing.
A study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, conducted by Helen Reiss, MD from Massachusetts General Hospital, investigated the effects of three 60-minute neuroscience-based empathy training sessions on physicians and their patients.
Dr. Reiss and her team randomly assigned 99 medical residents and fellows from different specialties and assigned them to two groups. The control group received a standard, post-graduate medical education.
Participants in the intervention group, however, received the standard education plus 3 additional empathy training modules that were delivered over a 4-week period.
The empathy training sessions focused on teaching the doctors:
- The neurobiology of empathy
- The physiology of emotions that occur during patient interaction
- Skills to interpret facial emotions, and
- Self-regulation techniques, including breathing and mindfulness exercises
Evaluations were conducted at both 1 month before, and 1-2 months after completion of the education programs. Either 4 or 5 patients rated doctors who had participated in the study on their empathy and relational skills.
Patients were not told whether or not their doctor had received the additional empathy training.
The group of doctors who underwent the additional training received significantly greater changes to their scores of patient-rated empathy as compared to physicians in the control group.
Researchers also tested the physicians’ ability to detect facial expressions of emotion. The doctors who had received the empathy training scored significantly higher than those in the control group.
The study found a significant positive correlation between the doctors’ ability to detect facial emotions and the degree of empathy that patients perceived.
These physicians also demonstrated greater factual knowledge of the neurobiology and physiology of empathy.
These results are probably not surprising for those of us who are practitioners in other helping professions. Whether we’re working with trauma, depression, or helping people resolve a difficult relationship issue, the ability to convey empathy is crucial to supporting patients through a difficult time.
What is surprising is that the results were obtained following a training that took just 3 hours in total.
Now there were several limitations to this study, including that its sample size was fairly small. Also, the training was conducted by a single instructor who may have just been an especially effective and inspiring teacher.
The generalizability of these results could be increased if the trainings were delivered by several different instructors.
I think it would be interesting to see further research along this line, not only to see the impact on patient satisfaction, but also on whether increased empathy might contribute to improved patient outcomes.
What are some techniques you recommend for increasing attentiveness and empathy in clinical settings?
Please leave a comment below.
Listening from my heart center and not my mind. The lower the sensing, the more grounded I am and can separate my world.
This sounds like training with measurable positive results that should be continued and expanded way beyond the medical profession. I am diagnosed with several personality disorders and show a lack of empathy. Is there training out there for me to learn empathy or does this type of training only work for neurotypical people?
what are at least three members of nkwotres you belong to outside this class that you can have reciprocal empathy with and can collaboratively negotiate with AND that has some skill sets that would make them a good audience member for the new media genre you’re creating for Project #3? This is a really long sentence. I read it for two times. well, I am happy to hear that you will not count the points in this part.
Yes! Now take this into student interactions…social skills training.
I try to see the whole body since many folks are so good at maintaining a straight face. Repeated patterns in figure movement, change in breathing pattern etc and say it verbally to them. I notice you are doing….is that something you do all the time? Or whatever to open the conversation and let them know they are worthy of my attention and even little details about them are important.
True and sincere acknowledgement and validation of another person’s experience is empathy in action. If everyone’s experiences and the feelings accompanying those experiences were acknowledged and validated it would make a world of difference in each person’s mental health.
Hey Diane, I’m looking for a grief counselor and was wondering if you might have availability? My email is rainjudd@hotmail.com
Brene Brown has a short video on differences between empathy and sympathy
Thank you for sharing… love this! I’ve been a fan of Brene Brown’s for years, and have heard her speak on empathy. This short clip creates an easier way for me to remember the importance of this skill…
This short video presents a description of empathy that resonates with me.
Empathy can be contagious. Clients need to learn
self-compassion because many are so judgemental
toward themselves which only makes their trauma worse.
Some clients confuse it with pity keeping them stuck
in a victim mentality. Highlighting their strengths will help shift
some of their self-defeating behaviors. Connection heals.
Thanks for sharing this research.It does confirm the significance of empathy in healing practices emphasised in the East ren Philosophy of healing.I thought of the cultural differences in facial expression and the risk of misinterpertaion.I am sure it is integrated in training health are workers for becoming more attuned to the reciepients of their services.
Sounds like you want us to create a rough draft of new media for procejt 3 now. But I do have several questions: do we have to start doing the website for our procejt now or we can just wait. For the outside audience do we have to write the report of how they react for my procejt or they should write for me? And for my own procejt, should i ask questions like how do you feel about my procejt or i should just ask them what best healthy lifestyle you think would it be?Thank you…
Active listening skills and open-mindedness, a willingness to think flexibly and to question longstanding beliefs in the face of ambiguous or rare symptomatology. I see a lot of women with seemingly autoimmune symptoms who are dismissed by physicians as being “hysterical” or “psychosomatic” or having conversion disorder without consulting with psychology or psychiatry. It is huge disservice to these patients and a violation of the Hippocratic oath in my opinion. I appreciate your posting the results of this preliminary study and hope that it is replicated in other settings and becomes a standardized component of medical school training.
The effect of empathic information on the perception of support, safety, satisfaction and conection in the creation of an I-Thou – attuned and dialogical relationship – probably measurable in the decrease in the physiological and psychological coping with chronic ( maybe similar to Freudian repressive compulsion anxieties) stresses.
Empathy contributes to social health. Even WHO acknowledges social health as one of 3 pillars of health, along with physical and mental. Social health can and should be treated at the individual level. Empathy from doctor to patient is just one way of doing this.
I wonder how this course on empathy would affect patients cancelling or simply not showing up for important appointments?
In a book I am writing on healing from spiritual abuse, this is one of the critical elements which I am addressing. If true empathy can be taught to the average lay person, it is likely that my office would be empty of clients (none of my clients over the past 15 years have had any friends who had this skill to any degree), and churches could be safe once again.
This is amazing that so little training is needed. Maybe those who go into medicine are really wanting to help their patients and actually have a lot of empathy to begin with, but it gets shoved to the back of their minds with the usual medical training they get. This short course might just shove it back into a priority position.
Hello everyone, I had the great privilege to do a Masters in Integrative Health at The Graduate Institute in CT under the tutelage of Dr. Bernie Siegel. Without a doubt empathy heals, simply listening attentively and mindfully to a person while they tell their story also heals. Gazing lovingly into a person’s eyes also heals. There is already plenty of research confirming this in the world of energy medicine (yoga, acupuncture, Body Talk, Healing Touch, etc). There is plenty of research documenting that this can be done at a distance! What we are lacking is teachers, we need to access the young people in high school and let them know their is an entire world of knowledge that has been hidden from them. This is SCIENCE!! Many high schools have Science Fairs – let them do empathy experiments, let the young people go to nursing homes and hold the hands of older people and gaze lovingly into their eyes and then ask the older person if their pain has diminished. If you need a volunteer to collect this data, I volunteer 🙂
Empathy is a part of healing communication skills between a health care practitioner and a patient/client. Rachael mentioned the “p” word I wish was replaced by the “c” word by all of us. We want to increase comfort and reduce the focus on pain. I wish ERs and L&D floors would begin a comfort scale to replace the pain scale so prominently displayed. What we focus on we amplify.
“Many high schools have Science Fairs – let them do empathy experiments,…” Fantastic idea! I also think educators need to implement ‘resiliency’ in science class; kids are leaving high school in a ‘dream state’ only to find the world is a cruel master. I have often wondered why psychology/neurobiology is not taught in science class.
I don’t like answered qstieuon after watch and listen a video because it is harder than read article. This comment doesn’t do anything for me. My only response is that if you don’t like video there’s a lot of information out there you will miss out on If you’re trying to make a suggestion, it should sound like one If you’re trying to suggest we don’t watch videos for homework well, I could’ve assigned the book that this talk sums up. It’s about 300 pages The reason I like assigning videos is for exactly this reason: in 17 minutes he sums up his entire argument in his 300 page book. When you think of it that way, then: you didn’t have to read a 300 page book So, I spend much time for doing homework #8. Good