There is this one case at the Northern California hospital wherein a patient aged 40 having high blood pressure was suggested to go through a CT scan of the lungs to know why she is having high blood pressure. The doctors suspect that there may be a blood clot, but they were all surprised when the CT scan result has arrived. It is not a blood clot but big cancers in both breasts that have spread through the body. If only they have done a simpler physical check on the chest of the woman, they would have detected it early on and they would have felt the tumors too. If the doctors have seen her and have performed the tests saw her 2 years back when she was hospitalized, the cancer might have been treated early on.

Second case

There is this middle aged man who was admitted in a hospital in Seattle 3xs in 6 weeks and he has the signs of liver cirrhosis. He was treated right away with it and signs like swollen legs and big abdomen, but there is this veteran doctor who saw signs of another ailment with the fast inward pulsations inside the right ear of the man. This is because it is not the liver of this man that suffers, but the heart. He has a constrictive pericarditis or a serious situation that requires operation.

In both cases there is an occurrence of some noticeable signs that medical educators say has been increasingly common as medicine becomes technology focused. The fading ability of the doctors to do a physical check to make a precise diagnosis is now taking place. The doctors should check the blood vessels at the back of the eye, check how the patient walk, feel the liver, check the fingernails that may indicate underlying ailments or problems in the first place. But in the past, physical detection skills were once the foundation of doctors in checking their patients before even asking them to go through certain tests.

Doctor’s skills

Some mechanisms of physical tests are unfamiliar like listening to the lungs & the heart and then checking the blood pressure along with the pulse. But there are certain parts of the Stanford Medicine 25 say that there are skills written that schools should consider for doctors and they are:

  1. Feeling lymph nodes and check if its benign or malignant
  2. Check the walk of the patient, since it may also be a sign of musculoskeletal impairment or neurological problem.
  3.  Check the patient’s tongue for infection or other ailments.
  4. Check the thyroid gland and palpate the spleen for possible enlargement.
  5. Check the liver if it is tender or enlarged and see if there are signs of live disease anywhere in the body.