When talking to patients, clinicians can sometimes feel overwhelmed by emotion. This may manifest as feeling low, sad or even as if you are going to cry. This can be an odd experience. It happens because we have, in effect, absorbed the other person’s emotion. This absorption is what is often referred to as “Empathy.”

The dictionary definition of empathy is as follows: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Empathy is encouraged in medical education and seen as something to aspire to. We would like you to consider whether it is actually helpful to clinicians or indeed patients.  Imagined events produce similar body chemicals to actual events, and so stepping into other people’s pain and misery multiple times every day, triggers stress hormone release within us and will eventually have an impact on our physical and mental health. Persistently high levels of cortisol and adrenaline lead to gastrointestinal symptoms, headaches, poor sleep and impaired memory and cognition.  We can often go home drained and feel we have nothing left for our own families. Over time, this leads to burnout.

This is a high price to pay for connection with patients and in fact, we cannot truly know what another person is feeling. We each view the world through a unique lens, we each have different neural networks and we have each most definitely had different experiences. When we are being empathic, are we not, in fact, guessing how the other person is feeling? At best this will be based on our experience of seeing lots of other people who have been in the same situation but most likely it will be a projection of how we think we would feel if we were them. Even when we have had a similar experience, how it affects us and what we feel about the situation will be vastly different.