One point of contention that rose from the recent study on physician empathy is that expressing the emotion takes an inordinate amount of time. Something that is in very short supply these days for doctors.

Surgeon Pauline Chen says that empathy shouldn’t be left to the end of the visit. In fact, expressing empathy throughout the visit shouldn’t make visits any longer, and patients appreciate the care that much more.

In other words, too little empathy, or empathy expressed too late in an encounter, may actually result in longer visits.

When the doctors did respond in a way that explicitly recognized patient emotions, patient responses were not long, as some of us might imagine. Instead, patients usually responded with one or two words, or a single sentence.

Update:
Health Beat has a nice piece today on the whether medical school beats the empathy out of prospective doctors, and what some institutions are doing about it.