The Value of Empathy on Healing
Those doctors, who could feel the pain, heal more patients. According to the new study published in the Journal Academic Medicine, doctors who are more emphatic have healthier patients than those who are not.
What is empathy anyway?
According to Wikipedia, empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another semi-sentient being.
Hence, is empathy a good quality that doctors in scrub uniforms must possess?
Ironically, it was also claimed that clinicians, caregivers, doctors and other men and women wearing scrub uniforms must take care not to be too sensitive to the emotions of others, to over-invest their own emotions, at the risk of draining away their own resourcefulness. Moreover an understanding of the limitations of empathic accuracy is discreet in a care giving situation.
Thus, a balance attitude towards the patients is a need in being a doctor. The absence of compassion to patients can make a heartless and ineffective doctor but an overwhelming emphatic doctor can also makes healthcare unbearable, to the point of not healing the patient.