I am a doctor in your shoes

Abstract

The ability to be empathic with the emotionally-charged personal accounts of patients in a medical consultation is an essential attribute of a qualified doctor. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how empathy is interactionally achieved by Chinese doctors in text-based online medical consultations (OMC). Based on 600 records of text-type online consultations retrieved from https://www.120ask.com, this paper aims to explore how empathy is pragmatically constructed for doctor-patient rapport management in online medical consultations. The findings of this analysis reveal that the types of empathy are in the form of cognitive empathy, affective empathy, sharing empathy, and nurturing empathy. By showing how doctors discursively used these four types of empathic strategies, the study contributes to the limited but growing body of research on Chinese doctors’ empathic strategies in online medical consultations.