Empathy in the doctor-patient relationship: skill training for medical students.

This empirical study was designed to test the effects of a systematically designed training program intended to help medical students develop empathic responses to patients and to attend not only to disease symptoms but also to the patient as a unique individual with a disease symptom. This training was meant not to enable the student to conduct a complete medical interview but to facilitate initial rapport between the student and his patient. The subjects in this study were 43 medical student volunteers, 20 of whom received the training while 23 served as a control group. The experimental group, following training, was found to function at a significantly higher empathy level than the control group. The participants also were significantly more able to attend to the patient with a medical problem, while the control group response remained predominantly an impersonal discussion of the medical problem only.