Empathy in the Physician's Pain Practice: Benefits, Barriers, and Recommendations

Abstract

Although numerous characterizations of empathy exist, a common one describes empathy as “putting oneself in another person's shoes and getting a sense (i.e., a cognitive-emotional grasp) of that person's perspective and what he or she is experiencing, feeling, and thinking. Put very simply, empathy entails taking the role of the other and seeing the other from his or her internal frame of reference” (p. 217) [1]. Empathy, therefore, is not sympathy or feeling sorry for another, nor is it only respectfully listening to the patient talk. It is, as Carl Rogers famously asserted, an “as if ” phenomenon wherein I imagine not what this experience would be like for me, but rather what it would be like as if I could live in this other person's world and feel and interpret that person's experiences as he or she does (pp. 210–211) [2]. (For various characterizations of empathy, see Appendix 1.) As the following will show, empathy is a decidedly ethical construct: its utilization is singularly respectful of the patient's personhood. An empathic approach will elicit a patient's choices or aid in empowering the patient to exercise his or her autonomy. Because a fundamental empathic goal is to deepen and nurture the patient–provider relationship such that benefits can obtain, empathy becomes a healing clinical modality in itself. Last, because empathy usually employs a nonthreatening and nonjudgmental approach, its practitioners desist from “prejudging” the client's behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes. The empathic approach treats all patients equally: as persons worthy of unconditional respect. The goal of this essay is to explore the phenomenon of empathy from the perspective of the physician's pain practice. Beginning with an account of how an empathic stance can be extremely therapeutic in a pain management practice, this article will then discuss common barriers to …