Compassion in health care seems like it should be a given. Doctors enter the demanding field of medicine because they want to help people, and patients want physicians who care deeply about their well-being. So why is there a crisis of compassion in the sector today? Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, two physician scientists at Cooper University Health Care in New Jersey, examine that topic in their new book, Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference. Relying on evidence gathered from hundreds of studies, the authors make the case for why compassion leads to better outcomes for patients and lower rates of burnout for practitioners. Trzeciak, who is chief of medicine at Cooper as well as chair of medicine at Cooper Medical School at Rowan University, joined the radio show on SiriusXM to talk about bringing more compassion into the practice of medicine. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
Stephen Trzeciak: Nomenclature is important in any scientific discipline, and compassionomics is no different. Researchers define compassion as an emotional response to another’s pain or suffering involving an authentic desire to help. It’s slightly different from a very closely related term of empathy. Empathy is the feeling, understanding or detecting of another’s emotions and resonating with that. Compassion takes it one step further and means taking action to help alleviate that to some extent.
I’ve seen reports that say doctors often don’t feel like they have the time to provide empathy. How much does that factor into this issue?
Trzeciak: Empathy is vital because if you don’t detect or understand another’s emotional state, you’re not going to be inclined to take action with compassion to help alleviate it. A study from 2012 published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 56% of physicians said they don’t have time for compassion. That was a piece of data among many that indicated to Anthony Mazzarelli and I that there is, in fact, a compassion crisis in health care. You may say we have a compassion crisis in society at large, and that’s a topic for a different day. I’m going to stay in my lane as a physician scientist and just speak to the effects of compassion….(Readmore)