When was the last time your doctor actually examined you? I do not mean when someone checked your blood pressure, copied your medication list, looked at your laboratory results, or listened briefly through a shirt before returning to the computer. I mean examined you. Looked at you. Watched you breathe. Felt your pulse. Looked at your eyes. Examined your neck. Listened carefully to your heart and lungs. Palpated your abdomen. Watched you walk. Noticed the color of your skin, the movement of your hands, the expression on your face, and the thousand other small pieces of information that a human body offers to someone who has learned how to observe it.
For most of the history of medicine, this was not an optional ritual performed before ordering the “real tests.” This was medicine. Today, increasingly, it is treated as something quaint, inefficient, or unnecessary.
I have spent most of my professional life taking care of very sick people. Critical care is one of the most technologically intensive areas of medicine ever created. I love technology. I have watched mechanical ventilators breathe for patients who could no longer breathe for themselves. I have used ultrasound, CT imaging, sophisticated hemodynamic monitoring, extracorporeal technologies, molecular diagnostics, and laboratory measurements that physicians a generation before me could only have dreamed about.
I would never want to return to a world without these tools. But after decades at the bedside, I have also learned something that becomes more obvious, not less, with experience: technology is most powerful when it extends the physician’s senses. It becomes dangerous when it persuades the physician that those senses are no longer necessary.
The Patient Before the Data
Experienced clinicians understand something that is remarkably difficult to teach in a lecture hall or classroom. Sometimes you walk into a room and know immediately that something is wrong. You may not yet know what it is, but you know it before the laboratory does. The patient is breathing differently. His skin looks different. She answers a question a fraction of a second more slowly than she did several hours earlier. Posture, speech, facial expression, respiratory effort, or level of attention changes. None of these observations is magical. They are data, collected by a biological instrument trained through thousands and thousands of encounters: the physician.
When I round in an intensive care unit (ICU), I can learn an enormous amount before touching the computer. I can see whether a patient is fighting the ventilator. I can hear secretions from the doorway. I can see accessory muscles contracting. I can recognize when someone who looked reasonably comfortable earlier suddenly looks exhausted. I can see peripheral perfusion, diaphoresis, agitation, abdominal distension, or a subtle change in mental status. None of this means I should ignore the arterial blood gas, the chest radiograph, the CT scan, or the monitor. Of course I need them. The mistake is believing that because those measurements are more technologically sophisticated, they are necessarily more real than what is happening directly in front of me.
Medicine once began with the patient and proceeded toward testing. Increasingly, it begins with testing and eventually works its way back toward the patient. Abraham Verghese and colleagues have described this inversion of the diagnostic process, in which clinicians may encounter an image or electronic representation of a patient before encountering the patient himself. That change sounds subtle. It is not. Once the CT scan, laboratory panel, consultant note, medication list, and previous diagnoses have entered our minds, we no longer approach the patient without preconceptions. The data have already told us what we are supposed to see.
This is one reason the physical examination should never be reduced to nostalgia. Its value is not that physicians once carried black bags and made house calls. Its value is epistemological. It provides an independent stream of information. The history and physical examination can support what the tests tell us, but they can also contradict them. That contradiction is often where important medicine begins. A normal number should make us reconsider an abnormal observation, but an abnormal observation should also make us reconsider a normal number.
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