Researchers measured vicarious empathy, defined as a person's vicarious emotional response to perceived emotional experiences of others. Students reported their agreement or disagreement on a nine-point scale in response to statements such as "I cannot feel much sorrow for those who are responsible for their own misery."
Medical student empathy for patients begins to drop during the first year of medical school. The decline was likely due to a year of stress and anxiety linked to the students' competitiveness and desire to overachieve on exams, said Dr. Newton, associate dean of undergraduate medical education at the Arkansas medical school. Scores decreased again after the third year in school, when students finished their first year of clinical rotations.
Jerome Groopman, MD, author of How Doctors Think and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said it is clear physicians become worn down by time pressures, work load and the diminishing sense of autonomy in the health care system.
"The public tells us they want physicians who are good diagnosticians and also caring people," Dr. Frankel said. "We start with students who are very caring but have no diagnostic skills and end up with physicians with great diagnostics skill but who don't care."
(Myrle Croasdale, AMNews)
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