Medical teacher
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Empathy is one of the fundamental factors in patient care that is beneficial to both patient and physician. ⋯ Results support the construct and criterion-related validities and reliability of the Persian version of the JSPE. Score difference between Iranian and American samples may not reflect a genuine difference in empathy trait and can be explained by cultural factors.
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Real patients are generally recruited to participate in assessment of medical students all over the world in their clinical examinations. In the past, such voluntary patients were taken for granted. However, this is no longer true nowadays. ⋯ Printed information given during recruitment, and briefing sessions conducted immediately prior to the examination are recommended to improve patients' satisfaction.
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Physicians' empathy is generally regarded as important and attempts are made to foster empathy. However, research indicates that the medical students' empathy is often stunted during medical education, and our understanding of how empathy is modulated during medical education is limited. This critical review explores some relatively-neglected challenges in the literature on empathy development in medical education. ⋯ This may contribute to sustain a double-blinded, dichotomized clinical gaze--a clinical gaze that tends to separate biomedical aspects from human experience and understanding and to neglect existential aspects of both the physician and the patient. Empathy training and the humanities should not be situated outside the hard core of medicine, but rather foster critical discussions of the limits and strengths of biomedical paradigms throughout medicine. In this way, the gap between biomedicine and the humanities could be bridged, and empathy training could contribute both in developing physicians' general clinical perception and judgement and in preventing the widespread stunting of empathy.