Words That Matter

Medical Writings
2001 American College of Physicians

Empathy is different than sympathy. Sympathy means that because someone feels an emotion, the sympathetic person feels it as well or feels a corresponding emotion, empathy is much more general. Empathy means the empathetic person understands the emotion of the other, and helps the other to know they are being understood. Empathy is very important for doctors to display and has been shown to lead to patient health benefits. One of the main ways for doctors to display empathy is to restate what the person has said, "Let me see if I have this right" or "I want to be sure I understand what you mean."

Our system needs to be able to catch these and similar phrases and give appropriate responses. It also talks about doctors learning patience, "don't just do something, stand there," meaning our patient should tell at least one long story. For the breast mass scene, I think when they first get around to the sister having breast cancer, she should tell the whole story, at least 30 seconds, if not longer. Then when the doctor says, "that must have been scary", she needs an appropriate response.

There are several other phrases indicated in the paper that really need to be added to the system. Right now, the scripts and the scripting system are a group effort. I think we will eventually need someone who's job it is to really make a great scripting system. Someone who is getting their PhD on NLP. But for now, we just need to add a bunch more empathy related responses and get it to recognize those responses correctly.

They also mention talking to someone with a different culture than the Doctor's own. This could be a very interesting scenario. I might like to investigate that in the future.

Quality: 5
Relevance: 5