By Dr. Victor S. Sierpina
Editor’s note: This the first in a series.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Empathy is the ability to detect, understand, and relate to another’s emotions. It is the basis of deep interpersonal relationships, including therapeutic relationships such as between a healer and a client or patient. Much of empathy is a nonverbal process.
Empathy is different from compassion. Compassion is a positive trait embraced by all major faith traditions. Compassion literally means “to suffer together.” It is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and the feeling you have motivating you to relieve that suffering.
You can imagine how you might feel in a similar situation and conceive of how you might support and help the other person either physically, emotionally, metaphysically or even spiritually. This is compassion.
Empathy refers to our ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person directly rather than interpreting them as we can do with compassion. Empathy is something that comes naturally to some people but can be developed and improved in others.
A recent article in Academic Medicine describes an evidence-based acronym (E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.) developed at Massachusetts General, the Harvard teaching hospital, to improve patient perception of clinician empathy. Researchers analyzed body language, neurological signaling, facial expressions and neural substrates of empathy.
Learning empathy is highly important in training health professionals. Patients expect and deserve attentive, understanding care from a provider who makes a skilled attempt to understand their perspective. Indeed, without such a connection, the therapeutic relationship and quality of care suffers.
Factors such as adherence to prescribed therapy, patient anxiety, and loss of trust may result. Many factors can affect this process including cultural and language barriers, inaccurate projection of one’s own feelings on another person, or inattentiveness and lack of sympathy because of time constraints or other factors.
Even malpractice rates may be affected in the health care setting. A study that analyzed the tone, but not the content, of surgeons’ conversations with patients found a significant higher malpractice rate in those whose tone was rated as domineering and non-empathic, and thus created dissatisfaction among their patients.
Imagine as an example someone in an adjacent room hearing the soothing, caring tonalities of a mother calming her infant. Compare this to the surgeons’ tones, which sounded harsh, confrontational, and dismissive. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, especially if there were surgical complications.
So here are some things to remember when you are with others and wish to create a feeling of empathy, which is probably most of the time!
Eye contact, Muscles of facial expression, Posture, Affect, Tone of voice, Hearing the whole person, Your response. E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.
Tune in next week for more details on the skills you need to improve empathy with your friends, family, patients, clients, and if you are in business, with your customers and partners.
Dr. Victor S. Sierpina is the WD and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine and Professor of Family Medicine at UTMB.