When I moved to Colorado in 2004, one of my problems was finding a whole new set of doctors. In addition to a primary care physician, I had to find an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, a podiatrist, a chiropractor, a dentist, and other specialists for passing problems. I didn’t even try to find an endocrinologist here. I can remember at least 20 doctors who treated me in the past eight years.

Ever since I began to manage my diabetes I have been extraordinarily healthy. So that’s not why I am so familiar with doctor’s offices. All of us who have diabetes need a primary care physician and some of these specialists. The main reason why I kept changing doctors was because I didn’t like a lot of them.

Finally, I like all of them who I go to now. I even count two of them, my primary care physician and my chiropractor, as personal friends. My current medical team consists of six essential doctors.

But the great number of doctors that I have run through led me to wonder if perhaps I was being too picky. Maybe, I reflected, I shouldn’t use how well we get along as one of my criteria.


But a new study validates my feelings about the doctors who I engage to treat me. Empathy between doctor and patient, it turns out, does have a lot to do with how well we do.

Actually, the study shows that when our doctors have more empathy to us we do better than when our doctors have low empathy scores. Since their empathy plays a huge role in how much we like then, I now feel justified in seeking out doctors I like.

They base this large study on a well-validated questionnaire called the Jefferson Scale of Empathy. The doctors gave numerical answers to 20 questions that show how much they understand our worries, concerns, pain, and suffering as well as their ability to communicate this to us.

The study included 242 doctors who treated 20,961 patients in Italy who have diabetes and compared outcomes, specifically what they called “acute metabolic complications.” Specifically, they tracked the rate of high blood sugar, extremely low insulin production, and diabetic comas among the patients of these doctors. The level of complications among those people with diabetes who went to the doctors with the greatest empathy was about two-thirds that of those whose doctors scored lower on the questionnaire.

Researchers from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia conducted the study. The full-text is online in the September issue of Academic Medicine.

The empathy that our doctors have with us is an important facet of patient-centered medicine, which the medical profession is beginning to seriously consider. I just returned home from participating in a review of a joint position statement about it by the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. I served as the patient advocate and only person with diabetes on a panel of 18 medical professionals that considered how best to teach this new emphasis to other doctors.