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Bedside manners: I was taught to tap and thump my patients and listen for the sounds of sickness and health. But this is fast becoming a lost art, and that's bad for everyone.

Article Excerpt
When it was time to hang pictures in our new house in San Antonio, my wife asked me to buy a stud finder. As a husband I demurred; as an internist I flat-out refused. We internists make it our business to divine the stutters and stumbles of lungs, hearts, brains, adrenals, guts, gonads--hence the term "internal medicine." Once upon a time, doctors examined patients not with CAT scans or MRIs but with their senses. "Surely," I said, "skills that can find pus behind the chest wall can find a stud behind drywall." [paragraph] Under her skeptical eye, I dragged my fingertips alongthe wallpaper. I flattened my palm and tapped on the back of my left middle finger using the tip of my right middle finger. My hands drummed over the pressed gypsum, sounding it, discovering the spots where the resonance became muffled, abbreviated--thud rather than thoom. In the medical world, this is known as percussion, a technique that physicians have employed for centuries to sound the body's depths. Using it, I had found the upright wooden timbers that even in the best circles of society are called studs. My brother-in-law, who fought in Korea, who wears ten-gallon hats, and who is fond of me but feels that most medical professionals are in it for the luxury cars, golf, exotic vacations, and early retirement, was impressed. As we hammered the nails in and hung the pictures, he said, "I didn't think a doctor could do that anymore." [paragraph] My wife thinks of me as a Luddite. She believes that if a gadget has found its way onto a catalog page and if its price is many multiples of a bar of soap, it must be useful. But that evening the pendulum swung in my favor. It was one of those man-puts-machines-to-pasture moments where the sheeplike drift of consumer society toward another "must have" is momentarily halted. Please, I beg you, say no to pet dishes on legs that enable Fido to drink in an "anatomically correct" fashion, say no to battery-operated fridge air purifiers, and say no to stud finders. I fell asleep that night thinking about an instructional pamphlet that I would put in every homeowner's Welcome Wagon basket, alongside the coupons, refrigerator magnets, and recipes for orange-peel-flavored scones: "Find the Hidden Stud in Your New Texas Home."

The sad thing is that a homeowner armed with such a pamphlet and with one other critical ingredient-faith-can soon become more skilled at percussion than the average physician. It is fast...

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