From Detached Concern to Empathy
Subtitle: Humanizing Medical Practice
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: February 15, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 188
ISBN-13: 9780195111194
First sentence: A medical-surgical team at an East Coast hospital requested a psychiatric consultation for Ms. G., a fifty-six-year-old white woman with diabetes mellitus who had just had her second above-the-knee amputation.
Description: Physicians recognise the importance of patients' emotions in healing, yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. The book argues that by empathising with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy.