This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letters  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Patient-Physician Communication  • Patient Education/ Health Literacy  • Patient-Physician Relationship, Other  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Diane S. Morse, MD; Elizabeth A. Edwardsen, MD; Howard S. Gordon, MD

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In reply

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to Dr Merlo's comments regarding our article¹ on missed opportunities for empathy in lung cancer communication. We agree that physician-provided empathy is important and may benefit patients.

Regarding the rationale for selecting the transcripts that were analyzed for the study, it is standard in qualitative studies to perform an in-depth analysis of a representative portion of a sample to address questions not fully answered from quantitative methods.² A prior analysis of data from these medical encounters demonstrated decreased trust³ and decreased patient participation⁴ in African American compared with white patients. These analyses indicated that lower trust among African American patients was associated with lower perceptions of physicians' provision of information and with lower affective communication.³ Hence, we chose a sample that included equal numbers of African Americans and whites and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION


CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED LETTERS

Missed Opportunities for Interval Empathy in Lung Cancer Communication
Diane S. Morse, Elizabeth A. Edwardsen, and Howard S. Gordon
Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(17):1853-1858.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

More Data Needed Regarding Physician Empathy and Patient Outcome
Lisa J. Merlo
Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(8):809.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT