Expressing an honest, personal, sensitive, caring attitude in every patient-physician encounter, despite objective difficulties such as time constraints, is an essential part of medical care and healing. As a result, both patients and physicians gain immensely and the quality of care and 'hard' health outcomes improve. Thus, empathic medical practice adds an absolutely essential domain to the current sophisticated, technological and scientific medicine, therefore existing deficiencies in the empathic aspects of care need urgent attention.