This paper describes educational programs designed to create humanistic physicians who are skilled in communicating with patients and committed to professional values.
For all medical students planning to succeed as humanistic physicians and scientist researchers, I'd argue that empathy training for these burgeoning physicians is just as important as basic biochemistry.
Principlism has succeeded in providing medical ethics with a basis around which to develop patient rights but has arguably failed in adequately ensuring a humanistic dialogue between physician and patient by overemphasizing autonomy.
Studies have reported that physicians, faculty, nurses, and allied health professionals and patients can reliably rate physicians' humanistic behavior [ 4, 15, 21].
In contrast, humanistic qualities of physicians were selected as the most important by 76/445 patients (17%) only, and just 48 additional patients gave an equal importance to the humanistic and one other domain.
"It's great from a humanistic standpoint," Dr. Zepeda said.
We found that physician training lacked core humanistic components that nurture empathy and caregiving.
Therefore, the ability of physicians in training and practice to function as humane, humanistic doctors is compromised by these challenges to the physician's own health and sense of balance [ 4].
We examined the skills and habits associated with decreased burnout among physicians who participated in the Humanistic Elective in alternative medicine, Activism, and Reflective Transformation (HEART), an innovative fourth year medical student elective teaching humanism, physician self-care, and integrative medicine.
Interviews and focus groups with female renal patients found that many felt that their physicians could be more professional and humanistic.
