Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in
healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses
in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached.
Halpern argues that by empathizing 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. Sympathy,
according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with
patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy.
How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients
rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto
patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and
philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional
reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy
cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional
skills, including associating with another person's images and
spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that
these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with
patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform
medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For
reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a
road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more
general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one
person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is
feeling?
"Jodi Halpern presents a scholarly and cogent exposition of the
philosophic underpinnings of the concept of empathy may be rightly
viewed as a seminal work in developing a scholarly understanding of
the subject of empathy and will assist in the development of sound
training and evaluation methods for imparting this skill to
physicians." - Sharon K. Hull, MD JAMA
"I would recommend this book not as a manual, but as a vital
reminder of how things should be, and as an insightful and
philosophically educational analysis of how things probably are for
the luckiest patients in our practice and hospitals." - Philip
Berry, British Medical Journal
"This is a beautifully written and beautifully reasoned book.
Physician-ethicist Jodi Halpern crafts one of the finest
descriptions available of psychiatry's advance toward empathic
involvement with patients. Intertwining psychiatry and ethics is no
easy task. However in Halpern's hands, a blend of formal research,
philosophical modeling, and straight talk shows how neatly
psychiatry and ethics work together." - Philip Candilis, M.D.,
Psychiatric Services
"This is an important book. I recommend it to physicians and
members of medical faculties for whom its subject matter is
important. It is a serious essay on subjectivity, a topic about
which we will be seeing more in the coming years. It repays the
work of reading it." - Eric Cassell, M.D., The New England Journal
of Medicine
"This lovely volume fixes on a profound truth in medicine: to the
degree we are moved by our patients suffering we are better able to
help them. The age of proteomics and genomics is the age of
'objective reality', yet for the patient it is all about humane
empathetic care. Halpern in this scholarly and wonderful readable
volume shows us that empathy is just as critical for the physician
and without it healing cannot begin. This book is a must read for
all of us with an interest in medical practice." - Abraham Verghese
MD, author of CUTTING FOR STONE, Professor of Medicine, Stanford
University
General
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