The Uses of Empathy: A Medical Student’s Perspective

“Empathy is the feeling that ‘I might be you’ or ‘I am you,’ but it is more than just an intellectual identification… empathy brings emotion.”[1]

While experienced health care practitioners may agree on a general definition of “empathy” and perhaps even recognize its theoretical appeal, they continue to disagree on its usefulness in clinical practice.  For this reason, if we hope to discover its uses, then we must study empathy both in theory and through clinical experience.  As Immanuel Kant once asserted, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”[2] Read more

Researchers uncover how breast cancer tumor cells break free and form metastases

Attempted cell escape. This scanning electron microscope image shows breast tumor cell (pink) on a thick layer of Matrigel (green), which mimics the basement membrane separating the body’s tissues. This highly invasive cell penetrates the Matrigel layer and “escapes” in a process similar to that of the invasion by tumor cells. Read more