From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice

by Jodi Halpern

Book Overview

Physicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195111192
• ISBN13: 9780195111194
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Physician-patient relations reconfigured

This is an outstanding treatise of the philosophical and ethical engagement between physician and patient. Working to move beyond standard medical school training approach of "detached concern", physician & philosopher Jodi Halpern argues for a progressive empathic stance, reasoned carefully through Kant and Descartes, enriched by psychoanalytic and psychological frameworks, but always grounded in her own experience with patients. This is a careful thinker and academic scholar at work here who has scoured the relevant literature and developed her own trenchant strategies for improving medical care. Designed for practicing physicians but provocative enough to appeal to philosophers and bioethicists. With up-to-date index linking research in medical anthropology, nursing, neuropsych and psychotherapy, as well as analytic mind/body philosophy. This is an author to watch out for.