Today’s med­ical tech­nol­ogy is absolutely fan­tas­ti­cally mind-bendingly incred­i­ble.  New diag­nos­tic devices are invented almost as fast as we can imag­ine them.

A hun­dred fifty years ago, the only tool a doc­tor had to test your heart was his (or her) ear.  Doc­tors of the day could detect basic abnor­mal­i­ties of the heart’s rate, rhythm, or strength.  Now, with echocar­dio­grams and even more advanced meth­ods, we can dif­fer­en­ti­ate a sub­tle range of car­diac prob­lems that was unimag­in­able in the mid-1800’s.

Back in those old days, a doc­tor also used her eyes to gather diag­nos­tic infor­ma­tion.  If she were around today, she’d be in awe of the gad­getry that’s super­seded the human eye.  Here’s one teeny exam­ple:  a cam­era so small (the endo­scope) it can slither through the stom­ach and into your intestines to pic­ture what’s going on there.

Years ago, doc­tors smelled and tasted your urine to diag­nose prob­lems.  (Sure it sounds weird, but it’s true – in fact, a taste of urine is still a diag­nos­tic essen­tial in parts of the world.)  With this rough test­ing method the doc­tors of yore could deter­mine if there was sugar in your urine – a sure sign of dia­betes.  Maybe they could guess at a cou­ple of other dis­eases too.  But now we have chem­istry lab­o­ra­to­ries that can detect a few parts per bil­lion of hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent chem­i­cals in your urine.

Our med­ical tech­nol­ogy is so advanced, that for diag­nos­tic pur­poses four of our basic senses – sight, sound, smell, and taste – are nearly obsolete.

But what about the fifth sense – touch?

With the sense of touch the story is entirely dif­fer­ent.  The per­cep­tual sophis­ti­ca­tion of the human hand is still way, way ahead of any engi­neer­ing wizardry.

The human hand can detect a remark­able range and sub­tlety of

• warmth
• tex­ture
• mois­ture, and
• elec­tri­cal and mag­netic field strength.

Unlike see­ing or hear­ing, the use of touch is active – the mus­cles of the arm and shoul­der delib­er­ately engage the hand in its encounter with a patient’s bod­ily tis­sues.  That means the hand can also detect

• the tight­ness or pli­a­bil­ity of mus­cles, lig­a­ments, joints, nerve sheaths, and other struc­tures, and
• the resis­tance to move­ment or ease of flow of these tissues.

Touch can also give infor­ma­tion about

• the enlarge­ment, atro­phy, or swelling of inter­nal organs
• the blood flow to an area, and
• the pres­ence of ten­der­ness, tin­gling, or numbness.

Of course, the advanced skill of an expert in pal­pa­tion goes way beyond rou­tine, untrained touch.

To gather diag­nos­tic infor­ma­tion through the sense of touch — that’s the def­i­n­i­tion of pal­pate.

Pal­pa­tion is the one irre­place­able diag­nos­tic skill all doc­tors should master.

Except they don’t.

Although they’re exposed to the con­cept of pal­pa­tion in med­ical school, most doc­tors never take the prac­tice time to advance beyond a kinder­garten level of mastery.

Why?

Here are a few pos­si­ble reasons:

• Doc­tors make extra money with fancier, higher-tech (though not nec­es­sar­ily more mean­ing­ful) diag­nos­tic tests.

• The use of high-tech meth­ods gives the illu­sion of greater exper­tise and cur­rent sci­en­tific know-how.

• Doc­tors strate­gize to keep per­sonal patient inter­ac­tion to a min­i­mum, and are more com­fort­able sit­ting behind a desk and writ­ing prescriptions.

• Pal­pa­tion takes time – with today’s insurance-dictated reim­burse­ment, actu­ally touch­ing a patient takes too long.

What­ever the rea­sons, the result is poorer patient care at a much higher cost.  The lim­ited use of pal­pa­tion is one rea­son Amer­i­cans receive sub­stan­dard care at inflated prices.

Trag­i­cally, pal­pa­tion has been all but aban­doned – except by one group of doc­tors.  Doc­tors of Chi­ro­prac­tic.

Because of their advanced train­ing and daily use of the art of pal­pa­tion, doc­tors of chi­ro­prac­tic are often able to arrive at a more mean­ing­ful diag­no­sis of your prob­lem with­out being seduced by the results of fancy test results.

You deserve the best of both worlds.  At times, that could mean tak­ing advan­tage of the lat­est mar­vel of med­ical tech­nol­ogy.  But it also might mean hav­ing con­fi­dence in the highly devel­oped exper­tise of a physi­cian rely­ing on an ancient method – the heal­ing power of the skilled human hand.

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