A medical student learns to listen with her hands
In my first quarter of medical school, we learned the pulmonary exam. We were told to watch the patient’s breathing, feel for any asymmetries, use our hands to gauge resonance and listen to all lung fields with our stethoscopes. It didn’t seem too difficult. Our instructor demonstrated the exam on one of my classmates, and we were set loose with a checklist to practice on one another.
I repeated the steps …