Empathy and Communication

Empathy between doctor and patient is essential for good communication. Paracelsus maintained that “the foundation of medicine is love,” and modern bioethics maintains that the doctor maintains his art on the principle of beneficence toward the patient. This approach toward the patient with the aim of alleviating their suffering continues to be the basis of good medicine. The doctor’s first empathetic gesture is to recognize the other’s suffering. This suffering can be expressed in different ways: suffering (limitation), anguish (fear), hopelessness, pain, and uncertainty. The multifaceted reality of the doctor–patient relationship explains the different levels of knowledge that are at stake (epistemic dimension) as well as the different levels at which the life of a sick person is affected (pathobiography). Understanding our patient is not only listening to them but also being able to “put ourselves in their shoes,” to internally experience what another expresses with words or silences.