Postmedia - The 'physical,' a dying art
In an age of MRIs and CT scans, the physical exam is becoming a dying art. Sharon Kirkey discovers what's being lost - from an ability to diagnose to the human touch that says: 'You are more than a broken body to me. You matter.'
The patient, her head left bare from chemotherapy, her face creased with exhaustion, slowly breathes in through her mouth as Dr. Donald Boudreau listens to her lungs through a stethoscope… Seduced by CT scans and MRIs, by whole-body PET scans that produce once undreamed of images of the human body all the way down to cellular function, doctors more and more are performing just a cursory once-over, or bypassing the physical entirely. Instead, the tendency now is to order more and more tests to rule out every possible diagnosis - turning patients, some say, from living, breathing humans into static, computer-generated images of their bodies.
Boudreau, director of the office of curriculum development at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ's faculty of medicine and Arnold P. Gold associate professor of medicine, says that no one can argue that a reflex hammer or stethoscope is as reliable as 3D images of what's happening beneath the skin. But he says studies have proven the physical exam's validity and reliability in detecting and assessing disease.
