ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2019
Clinical sympathy: the important role of affectivity in clinical practice.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Communicating empathy sympathy and compassion in healthcare consultations: a systematic review of applied linguistic research.BMC health services research · 2026Pooled it
- Understanding the Boundaries of Empathy: A Qualitative Exploration in Pediatric Oncology Nursing.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Identifying physicians' views on compassionate care in daily clinical practice: a multicentre Q-methodology study in Belgium.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Permissibility, Moral Emotions, and Perceived Moral Agency in Autonomous Driving Dilemmas: An Investigation of Pedestrian-Sacrifice and Driver-Sacrifice Scenarios in the Third-Person Perspective.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The role of the ethics expert in Spanish legislation on euthanasia and mental health.Monash bioethics review · 2025Review
- Humor and sympathy in medical practice.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2020Article
- Disenchantment and clinical ethics.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bioethics has begun to see the revaluation of affects in medical practice, but not all of them, and not necessarily in the sense of affects as we know them. Empathy has been accepted as important for good medical practice, but only in a way that strips it of its affectivity and thus prevents other affects, like sympathy, from being accepted. As part of a larger project that aims at revaluing the importance of affectivity in medical practice, the purpose of this paper is to develop a clinical sympathy that can serve as a trainable skill for medical professionals. While everyday sympathy may be problematic as a professional skill for physicians, this does not imply that sympathy should be entirely rejected. As a natural part of our moral psychology, sympathy is an intersubjective affect that aids in our interactions with others and our decision-making abilities. I present here a theory of clinical sympathy as an affective response to patients, in which physicians are both attuned to their affective response and understand how their affects are influencing their beliefs and judgments. In this way, clinical sympathy serves as a trainable skill that can aid physicians in their interactions with their patients.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.