In their article on “Stigmatization of Patients with Chronic Pain: The Extinction of Empathy,” John Quintner and his colleagues discuss their concerns about physicians' empathic failures [1]. The authors note how unpleasant a physician's encounter can be with patients whose pain is not resolving or becoming manageable. The physician might feel blamable for the treatment failing, or might distrust the patient's complaints, or feel helpless, stupid, or angry. Not surprisingly, empathizing with the patient's experience—or imagining what it is like to walk in the patient's shoes, as a popular characterization of empathy goes—can easily be overridden by the physician's need to protect and preserve his or her professional self-esteem. Thus, and as Quintner et al. discuss, blaming or stigmatizing the patient as the real source of failure and disappointment becomes extremely tempting. The authors especially discuss how clinical language and treatment models that posit a mind–body dualism can relieve the physician's feelings of inadequacy when the patient's pain has no organic or demonstrable cause because, ex hypothesi, that pain resides in the recesses of the patient's mind to which medicine has very limited, if any, access. I want to pursue the idea, however, that the sheer “emotional work” connected with … Reprint requests to: John D. Banja, PhD, Center for Ethics, Emory University, 1531 Dickey Drive, Room 184, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Tel: 404-712-4804; Fax: 404-727-7399; E-mail: jbanja{at}emory.edu.