It turns out that doctors who show higher levels of empathy have patients with better outcomes, according to a new study published in the journal Academic Medicine. The researchers based their results on the study of 20,961 patients with diabetes mellitus and their 242 primary care doctors.
The doctors’ empathy was measured with the Jefferson Scale of Empathy. Then, the study’s authors compared the results with the number of acute metabolic complications among the patients. They found out that the doctors who scored higher in the empathy test had fewer cases of complications.
