The Experience of Empathy in Medicine

Authors: Carranza Bucio O*

DOI: 10.23880/phij-16000184

Volume 4, Issue 2

Abstract

The objective of this essay is to make some critical reflections about the phenomenon of empathy in medicine. At the interior of knowledge and practice of this discipline it is taken for granted that the physician must be empathetic with his patients and the idea that empathy is an aptitude that strengthens during the educational process of the medical student prevails. Nevertheless, from the perspective of phenomenology, empathy appears as a sudden event originated from our own experience of existence and that of the other individual. Based on this idea, it seems arguable that empathy is a clinical skill developed in the formative process of the health care workers. Through existentiary analytics, empathy can be seen as a “temper of the mood” and it is from this state of the soul that we can discover it as an ontological phenomenon

Keywords: Empathy; Medicine; Phenomenology; Education

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