The long list of empathy killers in medical practice is familiar: time constraints, financial imperatives, cross-cultural misunderstanding, interposed electronic health records, distancing telemedicine. Most alarmingly, now AI-based chatbots with their manufactured empathy threaten to supersede genuine human care. As these barriers between clinicians and patients grow, poetry can be critical in preserving the heartfelt empathy that joins us in healing. Many descriptive studies and some quantitative research support this assertion. Yet a poem like “Old Doc” actually illustrates how poetry fosters empathy in a busy outpatient clinic. Evident in its brief patient portraits are prime examples of what frustrates care, complex issues such as chronic pain, disability, and substance use, for which our time and resources perennially seem insufficient. Yet when the speaker of the poem, in the act of writing it with the use of juxtaposition, recognizes herself in her patients who become similarly imperfect people in the simple act of being named—“Connie,” “Juan,” “Deb,” “Hector”—these challenges suddenly seem surmountable. Empathy has been defined in many ways, perhaps most compellingly as the capacity “to feel oneself into the experience of another” as happens here when the titular “old doc” looks back and sees her own medicalized list of health problems, from “cervical myelopathy” to “C5-C6 hyperesthetic neuralgia” in the more humane terms of Connie’s “bum neck” and Hector’s “crawly skin.” Thus empathy becomes an opportunity to reflect on medicine’s shortcomings, expressed in the poem’s inspiring hope that what we can share is transcendent: “I should have given him something./Anything.”
