The Influence Of Medical Expertise On The Performance Of Empathy In Medical Sence

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference.A large number of studies have found that medical practitioners compared to others have the low level of empathy of pain in the medical scene.But the interpretation of this phenomenon is still controversial.A number of studies have considered that professional knowledge will affect the individual’s attention clues,and this situation will affect the individual’s empathy.We believe that the medical training may affects the subject’s attention clue,and thus affecting doctors’ empathy level in the medical scene.This study attempts to design two experiments to further clarify why medical practitioners have weak empathy of pain.In this study,the IRI-C scale was used to evaluate the individual’s empathy ability,and the scores of VAS were measured the empathy performance in the experimental task.The fNIRS was used to record the subjects’ brain activity.The first experiment is intended to validate the difference of empathy between medical practitioners and the general population.We ask the ordinary college students and acupuncture students to watch the medical scene picture,and let them to rate the level of pain of the people in those image.We also monitored the change of blood oxygen by fNIRS at the experiment process.The results showed that there was no significant difference between the scores of medical subjects and non-medical subjects in IRI-C.But there was a significant difference scores between medical subjects and non-medical subjects when the rate the pain level of experiment image.We can find when the non-medical subjects observe the acupuncture pictures,they activated the body sensory cortex and part of the frontal lobe significantly,and medical subjects in the view of acupuncture pictures not only the body sensory cortex activation,while the frontal lobe The area of the activation range is greater,the degree is more obvious.Indicating that the pain of these two types of subjects in the brain mechanism is also significantly different.In the experiment 2,we let the subjects to exam the number of needles in those images,find bone signs or rate the degree of pain.We use those task to control the subjects’ attention clues.And we still monitor the activiation of brain by using fNIRS.Before the experiment,the subjects were given a short time of medical professional knowledge training.The results showed that the differences of brain activation patterns of medical subjects were less different than those in the evaluation of pain tasks when the subjects were asked to perform tasks with bone signs.The study shows that when we set the subject’s attention clue on medical signs,the brain activation pattern will more like medical subjects.The above two experiments together can prove the following conclusions:(1)Doctors in the medical sence is less likely to feel the patient’s pain.(2)Doctors in the medical scene have the low level of empathy performance because of their concerned clues.(3)It may also because of long-term medical training and experience that doctors have reduction of empathy.