Regional
(2010-06-28)
Listen Now:
GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
In the practice of medicine - "squeezing the patient" may be associated with performing an unneeded and expensive procedure. But it means something completely different for KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel.
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For a couple of years early in my career I practiced in close proximity to a shy old doc. (Not so old, actually, when considered from the vantage point of my current life stage.) Patients were very loyal to him.
This steady, kind man of few words followed an invariant routine when he did hospital rounds. He'd stand at each patient's bedside somewhat stiffly, greet them, and then take their blood pressure.
Since vital signs, including blood pressure, are always performed and recorded in the patient's chart by the nursing staff, I assumed this doctor took the extra time to do it himself so as to generate numbers he trusted better than anybody else's. I was wrong. When I asked, my colleague told me that he took blood pressures himself to make sure that he touched every patient.
The act of wrapping the cuff around the arm, inflating it, then slowly letting the air out while listening, head slightly bowed, with a stethoscope pressed against the crook of the elbow assumed, in that doctor's hands, a sort of ritualistic quality. I'm convinced that the people he cared for responded to this medical sacrament because they sensed their doctor's true reason for taking blood pressures. He knew, firsthand, that touch reinforces rapport between patient and doctor. Year's later, reputable studies have found that patients estimate the time spent at a doctor visit as twice as long if the physician touches them in the course of the encounter than if she doesn't touch them.
We all know how much emotion can be conveyed in a touch. Now there's scientific validation of what our heart and our skin tell us. A research paper published last year in the journal Emotion reported that blindfolded subjects could distinguish, by touch alone, between fear, anger, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathetic intentions on the part of the toucher.
Some years ago a presenter from a malpractice insurance company warned an auditorium full of my colleagues and me, that we were never to hug a patient because there was always room for the gesture to be misinterpreted as a boundary violation.
Notwithstanding that caution, I've never stopped hugging some patients: women and men, adults and children. Of course, I use my judgment. I'm very deliberate about whom I hug, whom I pat on the back, and whose blood pressure I take and call it enough touching.
My main goal in making the contact is to do my job, which is to heal the patient. If there is a small risk in therapeutic touch, I see that risk as no different than the danger posed by the viruses and bacteria I am exposed to in the course of seeing sick people. I'd no more refuse to see a patient because he might cough in my face than I'd refuse to give someone a needed hug (provided, of course, that he is unlikely to misinterpret my gesture).
Knowing whom to touch, how and when is a part of the art of medicine. (To answer that old cocktail party smartass question, Yes, that's why we call it "medical practice.")
So, to my listening audience, know that Dr. Marc Ringel is sending out to you a warm hug or, if it's more what you're into, a heartfelt squeeze from a blood pressure cuff.
© Copyright 2012, KUNC
