Empathy: an essential skill for understanding the physician-patient relationship in clinical practice

In clinical practice, empathy is the skill used by physicians to decipher and respond to thoughts and feelings in the physician-patient relationship. Empathetic understanding and empathetic response occur in three phases of every office visit: the negotiation phase, the clinical reasoning phase, and the establishment of therapeutic alliance. Masters of empathetic skills is difficult, and before teaching empathy to residents and students, teachers must first develop their own empathetic skills. Development of empathetic skills can occur in Balint training programs, through the use of audio- or videotaped patient encounters, or through one-on-one training with an experienced preceptor.