ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2015
Understanding empathy: why phenomenology and hermeneutics can help medical education and practice.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Delineating family needs in the transition from hospital to home for children with medical complexity: part 2, a phenomenological study.Orphanet journal of rare diseases · 2023Pooled it
- A qualitative exploration of the therapeutic characteristics of the art of therapy: Perspectives on Ayres Sensory Integration.PloS one · 2025Article
- The Lived Self-Care Experiences of Patients Undergoing Long-Term Haemodialysis: A Phenomenological Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Weak inclusion of the medical humanities in medical education: a qualitative study among Danish medical students.BMC medical education · 2022Article
- Empathy as a learning objective in medical education: using phenomenology of learning theory to explore medical students' learning processes.BMC medical education · 2022Article
- Medical Students' Perspectives on the Factors Affecting Empathy Development During Their Undergraduate Training.Medical science educator · 2022Article
- Empathy in patient care: from 'Clinical Empathy' to 'Empathic Concern'.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2021Review
- Introducing Social Breathing: A Model of Engaging in Relational Systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Clinical sympathy: the important role of affectivity in clinical practice.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2019Article
- "It is through body language and looks, but it is also a feeling" - a qualitative study on medical interns' experience of empathy.BMC medical education · 2019Article
- Enhancing second-order empathy in medical practice by supplementing patients' narratives with certainties.BMC medical education · 2018Article
- Objectivity applied to embodied subjects in health care and social security medicine: definition of a comprehensive concept of cognitive objectivity and criteria for its application.BMC medical ethics · 2018Article
- Empathizing with patients: the role of interaction and narratives in providing better patient care.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2017Article
- The issue of being touched.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
This article offers a critique and reformulation of the concept of empathy as it is currently used in the context of medicine and medical care. My argument is three pronged. First, that the instrumentalised notion of empathy that has been common within medicine erases the term's rich epistemological history as a special form of understanding, even a vehicle of social inquiry, and has instead substituted an account unsustainably structured according to the polarisations of modernity (subject/object, active/passive, knower/known, mind/body, doctor/patient). I suggest that understanding empathy by examining its origins within the phenomenological tradition, as a mode of intersubjective understanding, offers a different and profitable approach. Secondly, I argue that the appropriation of empathy in medicine means that, ironically, empathy can function as a technique of pastoral power, in which virtue, knowledge and authority remain with the doctor (Mayes in Bioeth Inq 6:483-493, doi: 10.1007/s11673-009-9195-9 , 2009). And thirdly, empathy is in danger of being resourced as a substitute for equity and funding within health systems. I conclude however with hope for the productive possibilities for empathy.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.