The Importance of Being Empathic

Abstract

To the Editor. —I wish to commend Drs Bellet and Maloney on their excellent article reviewing the importance of empathy as a tool in medical practice.1In total, it was a timely review of a critical issue in medicine. Unfortunately, I fear that the authors may have inadvertently prejudiced the character of empathy when they limited their comments to the nature of compassion as a clinical device. The social revolution that is rapidly enveloping the field of medicine is not designed to produce physicians who are merely aware of the mechanism for acting in an empathetic manner, but, rather, it hopes to develop physicians who can remain both profoundly human and professionally competent in the clinical setting. Patients cannot be satisfied by a physician who is merely capable of offering some sort of placebo perfunctory conciliation in times of crises for, as with any placebo, when patients realize