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Gut feeling is important to the GP

A new study from CaP shows that GPs with great empathy listen to their gut feeling when facing a patient.

GPs often base clinical decisions on gut feeling. This study shows that GPs who show a high level of empathy use their gut feeling in daily clinical work. This finding is consistent with previous studies which have shown that the concern of patients or relatives can spur the GP's gut feeling.

The survey is based on questionnaire replies from 588 GPs from the Central Denmark Region. The participating GPs were ranked according to their score on the empathy scale and then divided into four equal groups based on lower quartile, median and upper quartile. Thus, in the first group, 25% of the GPs who had the lowest score on the empathy scale and in the fourth and last group were 25% of the GPs who had the highest score on the empathy scale. When the doctors in the fourth and last group were compared to the doctors in the first group, they had fourfold the odds of increased use of gut feeling in daily clinical work.

As the GPs' use of empathy is associated with burn-out, it was investigated whether burn-out is associated with GPs' use of gut feeling, but this could not be confirmed.

As the use of gut feeling appears to have diagnostic value, the results of this study indicates that increased focus on empathy during medical school could increase the use and reliability of gut feeling in the clinical work.