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Culture of Empathy Builder:  Jodi Halpern
http://j.mp/T63aQf

Jodi Halpern and Edwin Rutsch: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare

Jodi Halpern M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health. As a psychiatrist with a background in philosophy, she investigates how emotions and the imagination shape healthcare decisions of clinicians and patients. She is author of From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Clinical Empathy: "As a psychiatrist as well as a faculty member in bioethics at UC Berkeley for almost two decades, I’ve investigated what happens to patients when their doctors show a lack of empathy. Doctors were trained to believe that emotional detachment from patients is personally and professionally necessary, but experience shows that patients don’t trust doctors who are aloof or superficially friendly. Yet, only recently have studies proven just how harmful detachment and how beneficial empathy is for healing...."
Sub Conference: Health Care  and Science

 

 
 

Links


 

Panel 24: Moving Medical Culture from Detachment to Empathy, Jodi Halpern, Helen Riess, Edwin Rutsch  
  Edwin Rutsch, Director of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, hosts a discussion with two of the primary leaders in the movement to transform medical culture from detachment to a culture of empathy.  

Jodi Halpern M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and the School of Public Health.  She is author of From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Helen Riess M.D., Ph.D is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.  She is Chief Technology Officer of Empathetics which offers scientifically based empathy training proven to optimize interpersonal engagement.
Sub Conference: Health Care

 

Jodi Halpern: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare (Part1)
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Chapter 1 & 2)

 

This is part one of a chapter by chapter review of the Jodi's book
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Preface & An Overview of the Book
 

Chapter 1: Failures of Emotional Communication in Medical Practice

  • Emotional irrationality

  • Overview of Book

Chapter 2: Managing Emotions as a Professional Ideal

  • Detachment to Avoid Errors of Sympathy

  • Tradition of Sympathy

  • Ideal of Objectivity

  • Emotions and Cognition

 

Jodi Halpern: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare (Part 2)
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Chapter 3)

 
This is part two of a chapter by chapter review of the Jodi's book
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Chapter 3: Emotional Reasoning
(considers emotional reasoning, moods, and the nature of emotions.)

  • Associated Linking

  • Gut feeling

  • emotional inertia

  • Moods and temperaments

  • Strategic nature of emotions

 

"This chapter explores the subjectivity of emotional judgments. A major thesis of this book is that by critically using these subjective sources of information physicians will take fuller histories and engage in more effective communication....  This Chapter has argued the the very properties of emotional reasoning that traditionally have been equated with irrationality can be harnessed in service of medical care if physicians can develop self-awareness. The most important use of emotional reasoning is for the practice of clinical empathy."

 

 

 

 

Jodi Halpern: How to Build a Culture of Empathy in Healthcare (Part 3)
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Chapter 4)
 
This is part three of a chapter by chapter review of the Jodi's book
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice.

Chapter 4: The Concept of Clinical Empathy

  • Clinical empathy as detached Insight

  • Aesthetics and origins of the concept of Empathy

  • Psychoanalytic View of Empathy as Affective Merging

  • A model of Clinical empathy as emotional reasoning

  • Summary: By contributing to diagnosis, patient autonomy, and therapeutic influences, empathy leads to more effective and not just more pleasing, medical care.

 

 

 

We're in the process of doing the interviews and reviews of  Chapters 5  to 6. Stay Tuned.

Chapter 5: Respecting Patient Autonomy:  From Non-Interference to Empathy

Looks at the important issue of patient autonomy. Does respecting the autonomy of the patient allow freedom for an interpersonal relationship and clinical empathy to develop?

  • 1. Respecting Autonomy: Beyond Non-Interference

  • 2. Beyond Negative Autonomy - Kant on Deliberative Freedom

  • 3. Autonomy versus Detachment

  • 4. Suffering, Empathy, and the Interpersonal Basis of Autonomy

  • 5. Kantian Theory and Positive Obligation to Share Ends

  • 6. The Complex Relationship between Empathy and Respecting Autonomy

 

Chapter 6: Cultivating Empathy in Medical Practice
Halpern discusses the vital issue of medical education and the importance of changing entrenched medical attitudes and practice.

  • From Certainty to Creativity

  • Emotional Irrationality Revisited: Finding the Therapeutic Opportunity

  • Regaining mental Freedom

  • Non-Abandonment

 

 

 

 

Panel 20:  Empathy in Critical Care - Empathy and Healthcare Conference
Keonnis R. Taylor
Jodi Halpern
Barbara Beach
Marilyn Ababio
Edwin Rutsch
This panel with experts in the field of healthcare explored the role of empathy and compassion in providing medical care. A few of the questions addressed were;  How do those providing objective medical care, especially around the grim subject of one's own death, provide compassionate care without absorbing the emotions surrounding imminent death?  
Sub Conference: Health Care
 

 

Don't Blame Empathy
Jodi Halpern MD, PhD,- Huffington Post
Author, From Detached Concern to Empathy, Associate Professor of BIoethics at UC Berkeley, School of Public Health

"In a recent New Yorker piece, Paul Bloom argues that empathy is the wrong stance for public morality, as in promoting public health, because it focuses our attention on the individuals we readily empathize with -- such as the baby stuck in a well -- and blinds us to the unmet needs of the many whose problems are harder to imagine. Mr. Bloom makes a number of valid points. But, as Michael Zakaras points out, Bloom seems to miss the cognitive aspects of empathy, and thus misses the crucial role that empathy must play in ethical decisions. Zakaras, though, goes too far in defending empathy as the basis of a coherent moral vision. Both authors ignore the bigger problem we face in policy decisions, which is that we seem to lack a capacity to bring our distinct moral perspectives -- empathy, justice, efficiency -- into one coherent view. This is a limitation of reason, not of empathy."

2012 -Gathering the Patient’s Story and Clinical Empathy
"Until the past two decades, physicians (unlike other caregivers) have been skeptical about empathy, assuming that it would interfere with their clinical objectivity and effectiveness. This has shifted as research has shown that empathy plays a fundamental role in both diagnostic accuracy and treatment effectiveness. Repeated studies show that patients first give superficial clues about their histories until they sense empathy, and only then disclose anxiety-provoking information (as happened in the reported case)."
 

2003 Aug -What is Clinical Empathy? Journal of General Internal Medicine:
"Patients seek empathy from their physicians. Medical educators increasingly recognize this need. Yet in seeking to make empathy a reliable professional skill, doctors change the meaning of the term. Outside the field of medicine, empathy is a mode of understanding that specifically involves emotional resonance. In contrast, leading physician educators define empathy as a form of detached cognition. In contrast, this article argues that physicians' emotional attunement greatly serves the cognitive goal of understanding patients' emotions. This has important implications for teaching empathy."

 

From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice - Philip Berry
"Like all good inventions, Jodi Halpern's new and “controversial” model of empathy appears to be the result of common sense imaginatively applied. Empathy should, she asserts, result from a willingness on the part of the doctor to take cues from his own emotional responses to a patient's suffering. It requires more than the “detached concern” that she believes, a little harshly I think, is the norm. Nor is an insufficiently intellectual “sympathetic immersion” in a patient's woes enough."

April 27th, 2010 - From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (review)
"Here’s a title that caught my eye, authored by Jodi Halpern. In From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice, Halpern makes a strong case for doctors employing empathy with patients instead of detached concern. Courageously, she points out the healing qualities of empathy as well as the simple practical application in institutional settings. From the Forward:"
 

From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (review)  Journal of Med Ethics
"Sick people and those who care for them have together learned a great deal in the recent past about the conditions most conducive to effective health care. Patients and their families have, with great generosity and bravery, written about their ordeals of illness in pathographies and memoirs, giving health professionals thick descriptions of what persons undergo at the hands of disease and its treatment (Hawkins 1999; Frank 1995). Nurses, therapists, and doctors—including Cortney Davis, Abraham Verghese, Rachel Remen, Jerome Groopman, and Susan Mates—have written with reflection and curiosity about how they live their lives around sick and dying people, their rewards proportional to their personal suffering"
 

Excerpt 1: Why the public needs empathic doctors
 

Empathy is not a medical frill but a necessity
Doctor need empathy to understand the subjective parts of humans. 
Not just the physical mechanical parts.

 

 

Excerpt 2: Why the public needs empathic doctors 


What is empathy?

  • there are empathies - many ways of doing it, listening and responding to each other.

  • What is Clinical Empathy

    • Engaged

    • Curiosity - (each person is a mystery)

  • If the doctor says "I know how you feel" you're in trouble.

 

 

 

 

==========================================================================
interview notes.
Jodi Halpern. M.D., Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at University of California  Berkeley.
author of 
From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice 

 

Other Questions and Topics to explore

  • Book on Self-Empathy

  • Empathy - Compassion Definitions and Relationships

    • Metaphors of Empathy

    • the feel of it

  • What about Mirror Neurons?

  • What does a culture of empathy look like

    • in healthcare

    • in society at large