Articles: empathy.
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BMC medical education · Dec 2007
'It gives you an understanding you can't get from any book.' The relationship between medical students' and doctors' personal illness experiences and their performance: a qualitative and quantitative study.
Anecdotes abound about doctors' personal illness experiences and the effect they have on their empathy and care of patients. We formally investigated the relationship between doctors' and medical students' personal illness experiences, their examination results, preparedness for clinical practice, learning and professional attitudes and behaviour towards patients. ⋯ The majority of the medical students and newly qualified doctors we studied reported personal illness experiences, and these experiences were associated with lower undergraduate examination results, higher anxiety, and lower preparedness. However reflection on such experiences may have improved professional attitudes such as empathy and compassion for patients. Future research is warranted in this area.
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The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to explore patient- and physician-specific determinants of physician empathy (PE) and to analyse the influence of PE on patient-reported long-term outcomes in German cancer patients. ⋯ The research findings suggest that reducing physicians' stress at the organizational and individual may be required to enhance patient-physician communication. Empathy, as an outcome-relevant professional competence needs to be assessed and developed more intensively in medical students and physicians.
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Comparative Study
"Could this be something serious?" Reassurance, uncertainty, and empathy in response to patients' expressions of worry.
Previous work suggests that exploration and validation of patients' concerns is associated with greater patient trust, lower health care costs, improved counseling, and more guideline-concordant care. ⋯ Empathy is associated with higher patient ratings of interpersonal care, especially when expressed in situations involving ambiguity. Empathy should be expressed early after patient expressions of worry.
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To investigate the influence of stimulus duration on emotional processing, we measured changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in 14 healthy subjects who viewed neutral or emotional images presented for 3 or 6 s. Presentation for 3 s reproduced the previous result of higher rCBF in inferior medial prefrontal cortex (IMPC) during neutral than emotional stimulation. Six-second presentation reverted this relationship, with activity in IMPC being higher during emotional stimulation. ⋯ Thus, prefrontal activity rises when a cognitive task accompanies emotional stimulation because several cognitive processes compete for attention. The IMPC may serve the mechanism of attention underlying the concept of a default mode of brain function, selecting among competitive inputs from multiple brain regions rather than just processing emotions. The results emphasize the importance of implicit cognitive processing during emotional activation, however, unintended.