The health benefits associated with marriage are disproportionately large in older adulthood, due in part to the powerful role spouses play in promoting each other’s well-being. What remains unclear is what motivates this caretaking. To determine whether compassionate love plays a role, the current study used an Actor–Partner Interdependence Model to examine how 64 older couples’ compassionate ...

Claudio Crisci, MD, Private Hospital for Rehabilitation, Naples, Italy: In the February 2011 issue of Neurology: Clinical Practice, Johnston et al. address the ethical issues amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) raises in a professional and compassionate manner. Nevertheless, some “unethical” thoughts come to mind. Doctors should not behave with an impersonal attitude, should be compassionate, a...

What does Islam have to offer health-care ethics that cannot be found elsewhere? I do not mean to suggest that there is only one answer to this question, because there are many. However, I will focus on the elevated status of the patient as the recipient of compassionate care. Today, the primary medical ethical issue is no longer a quandary such as “Should we withdraw artificial nutrition and h...

So-called compassionate therapy can provide life-saving drug(s) for patients but can also introduce liabilities that may discourage such treatment. The procedures required for compassionate use of imipenem/cilastatin and a summary of the results of its use are used as examples. Physicians requesting drugs for compassionate therapy face problems in the timely acquisition of antibiotic from the m...

Attachment with altruistic others requires the ability to appropriately process affiliative and kind facial cues. Yet there is no stimulus set available to investigate such processes. Here, we developed a stimulus set depicting compassionate and critical facial expressions, and validated its effectiveness using well-established visual-probe methodology. In Study 1, 62 participants rated photogr...

Although people generally are optimistic about the future, they will lower their predictions to brace for bad news when confronting a challenge to their predictions. Three studies examined whether this shift in predictions for self-relevant outcomes extends to predictions for others' outcomes. That is, the authors explored whether people display "compassionate bracing." Results reveal that part...

Compassion is central to the purpose of medicine and the care of patients and their families. Compassionate healthcare begins with compassionate people, but cannot be consistently provided without systemic changes that enable clinicians and staff to collaborate and to care. We propose seven essential commitments to foster more compassionate healthcare organizations and systems: a commitment to ...