Communicating Genetic Information: An Empathy-based Framework.

Contemporary healthcare environments are becoming increasingly informationally demanding. This requires patients, and those supporting them, to engage with a broad range of expert knowledge. At the same time, patients must find ways to make sense of this information in the context of their own values and needs.

How to clarify the aims of empathy in medicine.

This paper argues that enthusiasm for empathy has grown to the point at which empathy has taken on the status of an "ideal" in modern medicine. We need to pause and scrutinize this ideal before moving forward with empathy training programs for medical students. Taking empathy as an ideal obscures the distinction between the multiple aims that calls for empathy seek to achieve.