This be a great topic on Valentine’s day no ? Raise your hand if you don’t do well with abstract advice 🙋♂️. Empathy is such an important quality in clinical care and yet not always taught during clinical training. Showing empathy results in better rapport, better information gathering and lesser risk of lawsuits. This post is to try approach empathy from the analytical standpoint & teach it as a technical skill. Why do good doctors in TV shows seem more empathetic than real life docs ? – not talking of Dr. House 😆🤣 – that’s because showing empathy is a visual task, a performance so to speak. I even read about doctors taking acting lessons to display empathy – not to fake it but to improve ‘empathetic imagination‘. Let’s see what Mark Ruffalo – aka The Hulk – has to say about Empathy , since feeling empathy makes displaying it easier.
And here’s a good paper that discusses a good checklist in the form of EMPATHY mnemonic to remember to improve your empathy skills , that was borne out a randomized controlled trial done in 2010-2012. It’s a good practical way to remember the basics while trying to hone your Empathy:
E – Eye contact (while greeting, meaningful & trying to read patient)
M – Muscles of facial expression (read your patient)
P – Posture (don’t tower over your patient)
A – Affect
T – Tone (Dominant tones get you in trouble, friendly or even anxious tones don’t)
H – Hearing the whole patient (what would you feel in their shoe)
Y – Your response
About that last part of “Y” – During any patient visit, after hearing the patient out and it’s my turn, I always start with something like : “I am sorry you are going through this, I understand why you might feel X ” (X being grief, frustration, anger, fear, apprehension, etc, before I begin the clinical talk ) . If forcing a smile can make you feel happier than I bet displaying empathy can help you feel it !!
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