Importance of Empathy in Patient Care

Importance of Empathy in Patient Care Introduction Carl Rogers defines empathy (as cited in Patterson, 1977) as the ability to accurately perceive the internal frame of reference of another person, as if one were with the other person. That is to say that if you could actually feel the emotions of another, without going through the physical experience. This definition however, has been challenged. What another person experiences at a certain moment is not directly given. However, the presence of the other is directly given and so is the awareness that the other is experiencing self. This cannot be compared with other modesà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦of experience. The experience of another is unique. This means that the other modes of experiencing only are of partial help in explaining how the subjective becomes intersubjective. It also means that there is no doubt about who is experiencing primarily, and who is sharing or experiencing the experience of another. (Stein, E. 1989). These two definitions however different, are both used today in managing of patient care in the medical profession. This paper will briefly explore both definitions and will attempt to show sides of this complex subject. The research done for this paper will deal mostly with physician-patient and nurse/care provider-patient interactions. The goal of this paper is to show the importance of the role of empathy in pr oviding quality patient care. Causes Those physicians and medical educators who advocate empathy in the physician-patient encounters, suggest that physicians who engage empathetically with patients increase not only the patients sense of satisfaction but also patient  compliance with therapeutic regimens and increased physiological well-being. (Kim, Kaplowitz and Johnston, 2004). The persistent objection to empathy in the medical community comes from concern that empathy interferes with scientific and medical objectivity. What practitioners need are the skills to use their emotional responses for therapeutic impact. In the interpersonal realm, emotions are crucial of understanding reality. An awareness of ones associations and emotional resonances as cues to understanding the particular meanings that a symptom or diagnosis has for an individual. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). Both of there outlooks are important to good patient care. You can put yourself in the patients shoes and somewhat imagine what they are going through, while at the same time being straight forward and real about the diagnosis. The question for many medical educators remains whether empathy, no matter how valuable or carefully reconfigured, can be taught. The problem of empathy begins with the preoccupation with self that obscures the other. Jerome Lowenstein (Can You Teach Compassion? P16) sees case presentations as the opportunity for clinicians to teach nurses empathy by encouraging them to describe patients more fully as persons with intersecting social, psychological and medical histories, rather than reductively and disparagingly in terms of disorders, addictions and disease. Training in continuing care will be of little value without doctors who know something of the life of the people whom they serve; who can empathize with immigrants from Asia and Mexico, with southern or ghetto experience; and who knew of the Holocaust and of communist oppression. (Spiro, 1992). Empathy depends on the experiences and imagination of the person who is  empathizing and this dependency have the potential to exclude the patients suffering and the meaning the patient makes of suffering. Application The following story is a true-life experience that I encountered while working for Gambro Health Care in Jackson, Michigan as a patient care technician. Gambro Health Care (Now DaVita) is an outpatient dialysis unit. Dialysis is the treatment for patients who suffer from end stage renal failure (kidney failure). While checking a patients vital signs and asking him how he was feeling, the patient told me how much he hated coming to dialysis and how draining the process was. He talked to me about the constant observation of his fluid intake, taking all the medications that were required for his condition and the cramping he experienced while on the dialysis machine. I could only empathize with this young man, who was my age, putting myself mentally in his shoes. Because of the experience I had with dialysis patients, I learned how to listen to each patient story. Many of these patients had no one else to listen to them. I saw these patients for four hours, three days a week. I spent a lot of time with them over the years that they received their treatments. While I was talking with the patient, the nephrologist (kidney doctor) came by on his rounds of the patients. The patient proceeded to tell the doctor, his eyes full of tears, that he was thinking of terminating his dialysis treatments. The doctor proceeded to tell the patient, rather loudly, they if he terminated treatment he would be dead in a few days. Without even taking the time to sit down with the patient, the doctor left and went on to another patient. Needless to say, I was outraged. After a few moments, I asked our unit director why the doctor was so tactless and arrogant.   So many patients each day that he is only giving proper diagnosis and alternatives if treatment is not followed. At that particular time, I figured out that I must take time to listen to those patients, every one of them because I could be the difference between a decision for life or death. Impressions Even those4 health care practitioners who consciously privilege their patients experiences find themselves caught in a knot of power relations. The physician is always in power in the medical context, and such power subsumes even deliberate attempts to displace authority by acknowledging the patients subjectivity (The Doctor, 1991). To be ethical, clinical empathy must involve action, beginning with recognizing the broader social context of the patients health and well-being. With appropriate cautions, theories of clinical empathy should extend beyond the individual relation to socially determined inequities in health care. Conclusion Empathy is a necessary ingredient for both doctor and nurse in the application of good patient care. Good communication between a doctor and patient whether good news or bad, should always be given in an empathetic manner. The ability to not only give good scientific reasoning or diagnosis to a patient. However, to give it in a manner that just does not give the facts, but also a feeling of I care about what youre going through and I will do all I can to help. As for nurses, our hands-on approach to the patient in need, gives us a chance to some what feel what they are going through and to be empathetic about their situation.

The infallibility of the Bible The Contradictions

The infallibility of the Bible The Contradictions Student: Joan Williams Introduction: For many centuries, the infallibility of the Bible has been a topic on the agenda of both Christian and Atheist alike. Christians, as a basis of their claim, continue to quote 2 Timothy 3:16 which reads, All scriptures is god-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.[1] The fundamental argument for the Atheist is that there is no God, no evidence or proof of God. They claim that God cannot be proven by science which is the main way we study and understand the universe or natural world. In an article written by Jeffery M Jones outlining results of a Gallup poll done in Princeton New Jersey in the year 2011, part of their findings was outlined as followed,: Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual words of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s. A 49% plurality of Americans say the Bible is the inspired word of God but that it should not be taken literally, consistently the most common view in Gallups nearly 40- year history of this question. Another 17% consider the Bible an ancient book of stories recorded by man.[2] The Meridian Webster Dictionary gives the following definitions of Infallible: 1: Incapable of error: unerring

The Problems with Voting in America Essay -- Politics Political Essays

The Problems with Voting in America If one were to look at the voting history as of late in America you would surely find information on the Florida catastrophe in 2000. The problem with our voting system today is in the technology being used; many demographic groups find our current systems confusing and hard to use. As voters step into the polling places this election year many will be voting through new devices some even sporting â€Å"touch screen† technology and we can only hope that the new technology is understood and accepted. In the US each municipality selects their own voting equipment regardless of what other places are doing. According to this CPSR article the Vote-O-Matic system has been in place for over ten years in many US counties and while some may view this technology as acceptable the Vote-O-Matic was a major player in the 2000 recount. Many municipalities have the funding to adopt new technology but others either feel uncomfortable with this change or don’t have the funding. The problem with the Vote-O-Matic is it uses paper ballots that consist of many...

Subversion And Perversion In Two Gentlemen Of Verona and The Jew Of Mal

Subversion and perversion are both prominently conveyed in both Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Jew of Malta through numerous mediums. Subversion entails the opposition to societal standards and authority whereas perversion occurs when morality and religious views are contradicted. The use of religiously symbolic objects, mockery, sexual innuendo, hypocrisy and irony are the focal matters used to express perversion and subversion in this essay. Often when a reader or the audience is shocked by themes and incidents occurring in plays, it is due to a feeling evoked when one is confronted with overt opposition to religion, morality, politics and society. Two Gentlemen of Verona make use of the mockery of upper-class pretentiousness, crude and inappropriate sexual innuendo to subvert and perverse the topic of marriage. Launce continually speaks disrespectfully of his master, subverting the social class order of classical Europe by which servants must speak of their superiors with deference and hold them in highest regard. This subverts the social hierarchy by the utilisation of mockery that belittles his master’s class. My interpretations lead me to believe that the staff in this scene, may well be in fact a metaphorical staff. That is, the staff is code for Launce’s phallus. This is a subversion in that it is socially unacceptable to speak in such a manner, therefore it contradicts societies’ etiquette, and it also is a perversion because it is morally incorrect and sacrilege to use a typically religiously significant tool as a phallic symbol. When Launce declares: â€Å"My staff understands me†, he compa res his masculinity in sexual terms to intelligence. He tells Speed that his sexual drive and desire understands what he is saying, ev... ...The crucial element drawing these plays together is the mutual use of a symbolically significant object. That is, the staff. The staff is disgraced in the manner in which role it had been given in the plays. Although it is ambiguous, the staff appears to be a metaphorical phallic symbol in the Two Gentlemen of Verona used to convey to crudity of Launce’s views on marriage. Conversely, in The Jew of Malta, it is used in a most blasphemous sense – for the purpose of mocking the Christian faith. The faith is ridiculed when the staff is used satirically to ‘support’ the dead Friar and when Jacomo uses it with the intention to murder. This is explicitly ironic. Thus this essay has shown how irony, hypocrisy, mockery and sexual innuendo all serve the same purpose in these plays – to challenge the society by the subverting and perverting moral, religious and political codes.

Analysis Of Characters And Plot: Backroads By Tawni ODell :: essays research papers fc

Danielle Barnes Backroads SUMMARY OF MAJOR EVENTS Backroads begins with Harley being questioned by the police for a crime that the reader knows not of. He delves into the story that has brought him up to this point, beginning from a year after his mother shot his father. The events in the course of this are breath taking. Harley is nineteen and the legal guardian of his three younger sisters: Amber (sixteen), Misty (twelve), and Jody (six). His conflicts range from having to raise these three girls while working two jobs, trying to be like â€Å"other guys,† mentally sorting out all the complications that come with having a mother who murdered an abusive father, and coming to grips with his tortured and confusing past. As Harley continues to roughly go through his therapy sessions, the deeper truths about his abusive upbringing reveal themselves, including the reasons for Amber’s strange behavior about Harley secretly dating Callie Mercer (explanation will come later), and her promiscuous sex life. I think the major conflict would have to be Harley facing who he is and what his family is. Throughout the entire story up until the near end, Harley is led to believe that his mother is the one who killed their father. Actually, all of the children and the media and everyone else who knows about the murder accuse their mother of the crime because she turns herself in for it. Harley is torn between feeling like his father deserved it and feeling as though his mother had just given up. As the plot progresses, however, it is more apparent that something is missing. Their mother was planning on leaving their father; she had money stashed away to do so, but when Misty found out, she stole the money so that their mother couldn’t leave. There are hints of a strange relationship between Misty and their father. When Harley finally gets up the strength to ask his mother about the suspicions he has, she tells him that Misty was the one who killed their father, but it was a missed shot. She had been aiming for their mother instead, trying to get rid of her as if she was the oth er woman. Harley internally realizes though that Misty was simply revenging her anger for never taking care of any of the children, for never leaving when she should have, for not loving them enough. The ultimate climax, however, is at the end.

The Positive Effects of Athletics and Education

Samantha Buehler English 112 Mrs. Schaefer 2/25/13 The Positive Effects of Athletics and Education Academic learning and Sport Education are actually the complementariness of each other. They are the two sides of the same coin, which go hand and hand with each other. If education and athletics make a full development of the over-all personality of a person possible, he or she gets the qualities of leadership, tolerance, sharing and team-spirit from sports.In the article â€Å"The Positive Effects of Athletics On Educations† by Matt Blackburn(71) states that athletics has shown the improve the work ethic, increase the self- esteem, and increase the academic performance and achievement of the student-athletes involved. But according to the article â€Å"Contrary to Popular Belief: Athletics, A Negative Effect on Education† by Jake Cartwright states, In this country, athletics are seen as a great stepping stones for students to develop character, learn valuable skills, and they further aid in the everyday education of students.However, too many people are naive as to the truth about what effects athletics truly have on a student’s education. But with that said, I agree with Matt Blackburn and see that there are many positive effects of athletics in education and believe he proves his opinion very well. As I go on how athletics and education are complimentary of each other, I will discuss how education and athletics go hand and hand, and the positive benefits of Athletics. The mental development, including the power of reasoningof course comes from the academics.It, therefore, becomes necessary that education should result in the mental, moral and physical development of a student, which comes from athletics because while he or she participates in a sport, he or she develops how to have good work ethic and self-esteem according to Blackburn(71). But no one can deny that unfortunately, the present day system of education has too much stress on m ental development for a student. In the article â€Å"In College Classroom, the Problem is High school Athletics,† by Steven Conn states, American higher education bears some measure of the esponsibility. There are number of reasons that high school sports follow the lead of college sports becoming more professionalized. Athletes are becoming more and more competitive because they want that scholarship to a college and because of that the athletes drive off of education and athletics. But f or an all-round development of a child to get to that point, the curriculum should include sports and games and health education at a young age. A balance amount of school time should be devoted to Sports and Education.Sports and Education need to be introduced with all eagerness, because mental and moral development is just not possible without physical development. We must remember that a strong and healthy student will be more eager to stay focus with school and educations, who will set goals and will also gain life skills and knowledge for their future according to J. D. Robinson (101), the student/athlete, will develop more scholarly in education with experience of athletics. Not only will the athlete be scholar in education but will also build great self-esteem that will carry with them into the class room because they will see that hard work pay off.According to Matt Blackburn, athletics does build the self-esteem of student-athletes by providing them with opportunities to set and achieve goals. As athletes accomplish these goals their self-esteem and self-confidence skyrocket, and many times this boost of self-confidence is carried over into endeavors, including academics. A healthy and strong body is not possible without sports. The development of body is very essential in life. All our physical enjoyments, and even mental enjoyments, depend upon our body. All our degrees and achievements will be of no use without a good healthy personality.Life is a struggl e and the person with a healthy and strong body alone can face it successfully. Besides promoting health and strength, sports develop many good qualities to the athlete and with a healthy athlete he or she will have a healthy life style. They strengthen the power of endurance and promote discipline. Young men and women are trained to face defeat with a smile and maintain composure even in victory. Games are the greatest and the healthiest means of refreshment and recreation. They fill one with joy, drive, endurance and energy, which help a person a lot in facing the actual odds of life without yielding to gloom.So sports are not only essential but also necessary for an all-round development of the personality. The famous saying, â€Å"The battle of Waterloo was won on the play-grounds of Eton,† correctly and relevantly sums up the importance of sports in education even though people will still have questions of how athletics and education go hand and hand. Those people who st ill have those questions just do not see the joy in an athlete. Having athletics and academics can certainly strengthen a person all around and will give them an advantage to life. References Blackburn, M. (2012). The Positive Effects of Athletics on Education. † In The Popken writer, (pp. 71-74). Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co. , Cartwright, J. (2012). â€Å"Contrary to Popular Belief: Athletics, A Negative Effect on Education ( A Response to Matt Blackburn). † In The Popken writer, (pp. 103-105). Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co. , CONN, S. (2012). In College Classrooms, the Problem Is High School Athletics. Education Digest, 78(4), 21-24. Robinson J. D. (2012). â€Å"A Point of View of Athletics and Education: A Response to Matt Blackburn. † In The Popken writer, (pp. 101-102). Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co.

Knowledge Development In Nursing

Knowledge development in nursing has been somewhat of a hot topic in the more scholastic endeavors of the profession for quite some time. As the profession grew from a focus centered on treating physical symptoms and conditions to a more well-rounded approach that considered psychological, social, and spiritual needs in addition to physical illness, the need to break down the process of knowledge development arose.By utilizing nursing theories, which support the use of evidenced based practice in most cases, it seems as though the profession of nursing gained more credibility in the scientific community as far as the value of the knowledge produced; I feel that utilizing processes akin to those already accepted as prudent by more ‘established’ scientific fields helped achieve that credibility.In order to get to nursing theories, however, the process had to begin with a philosophical component that can allow for a separation from concrete/ scientific knowledge, among othe r things, in order to promote more abstract concepts and different methods to look at how we come to that knowledge. McCurry (2009) touches on this premise as she describes how a common theme, in this case the common good of society, can be looked at from many different perspectives, as it creates an arena in which those perspectives can be arranged to determine how to go about investigating the perspectives further.Although it wasn’t the center piece of the article, one highlight was a breakdown of how more abstract thoughts can be linked to the application of intentional actions through the use of theories, which stems from philosophical questions. Philosophy lays the ground work for knowledge production to be built upon. In a way, Kim (1999) echoed these sentiments as she discusses critical reflective inquiry and its applications in relation to pain management in a South Korean hospital setting.She admits that nursing has situations in which our therapeutic actions can be supported by one theory and conflicted by another. What it seemed to re-enforce was how our drive to answer the philosophical questions created by the issues we wish to address can use various forms to achieve that common goal, however, those that are centered around the evaluation of how our therapeutic actions actually pan out versus how we think they pan out will help us gain the most useful knowledge as long as we are able to recognize the need for, and benefit of, changes that help our patients out the most.We wouldn’t be able to gain the ‘knowledge’ that specific actions and changes are therapeutically beneficial without understanding why we wanted to make changes in the first place, and generating multiple attempts at making those changes to see which ones actually accomplished the goal would seemingly allow us to have the best chance at achieving what we set out to.Evaluating the nursing interventions we utilize to affect our patients for the better is im portant, we all know that. Abbott (1988) pointed out that although nursing is capable of evaluating our interventions in practice, we do not tend to emphasize the importance of breaking down specific practical interventions in an abstract way that allows for our ability to link the interventions we utilize to the thought processes behind it while we are out practicing our craft.This I can personally relate to, when considering how the first couple years of my personal practice was spent learning how to simply accomplish the tasks I was presented with in the time frame I was to accomplish them in (assessment, documenting, intervening, documenting, evaluating, intervening, documenting, documenting, documenting†¦ugh). I knew that there was good reason behind the things I was doing; however, I was not keenly aware of the concepts and philosophies that comprised that reasoning, I was simply focused on completing my tasks in a timely, safe fashion.Reed (2006) promotes the idea that n urses tend not to have a full understanding of the ‘why’ we do the things we do, and went so far as to say that there might be a level of mysticism when it comes to the healing processes we are engaged in. That mysticism was essentially summed up by purporting that when we can’t put our finger on the ‘why’ we do what we do, we fall back on concepts like intuition and gut feelings. It’s not to say that we are incorrect in our intuitions, however, we don’t have a strong link to the rationale behind it all the time.This is where the concept of breaking down the ‘why’ we do what we do into more abstract, philosophical components can really benefit us, as we can extrapolate on the intuitions and gut feelings into philosophical questions and building blocks that theories can be generated from. When we utilize practice centered theories that arise from abstract, philosophical questions, the whole process of ‘nursing’ can be explained and evaluated with more ease, and the knowledge we generate could be seen as more credible.Just saying something is true because it is doesn’t have a whole lot of weight behind it; showing how the knowledge we reference as truth comes to be and having evidence that supports it with results that highlight it is, by and large, the best way that nursing knowledge can be produced in a fashion that holds credibility with those that aren’t of our discipline. We know how awesome we are, but it’s hard to prove it to others without a process that everyone can relate to; that all starts with philosophy.