Communicating Genetic Information: An Empathy-based Framework.

This article addresses the challenges of communication in contemporary healthcare, focusing on genetic counseling as a field that navigates complex scientific information alongside patients' values and needs. It critiques the dominant teaching model, which emphasizes didactic information transfer, and the counseling model, which prioritizes therapeutic relationships, proposing an empathy-based framework that integrates both approaches. This epistemically oriented empathy facilitates a dynamic, interactive process of understanding that enhances patient autonomy, supports informed decision-making, and improves communication efficiency in informationally demanding contexts like genomic medicine. The framework also considers ethical implications related to autonomy and addresses concerns about the emotional labor of empathy in resource-limited healthcare settings, advocating for sustained empathy training and systemic support to optimize its benefits for both patients and clinicians.