Question

1. List what you would do to prepare a patient for a physical exam.
2. List the six methods used in physical examinations.
3. Identify what information may be collected during a social history.

Answer 1

Ans) A routine physical examination measures that you stay in good health. A physical can also be a preventive step. It allows you to catch up on vaccinations or detect a serious condition, like cancer or diabetes, before it causes problems. During a routine physical, your doctor can also check vitals, including weight, heart rate, and blood pressure.

- An average physical exam may include the following:

Updated health history

Vital sign checks

Visual exam

head
eyes
chest
abdomen
musculoskeletal system, such as your hands and wrists
nervous system functions, such as speech and walking
Physical exams
As the physical exam continues, the doctor will use tools to look in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat. They’ll listen to your heart and lungs. This exam also includes:

touching, or “palpating,” parts of your body (like your abdomen) to feel for abnormalities
checking skin, hair, and nails
possibly examining your genitalia and rectum testing your motor functions and reflexes.

The four basic methods or techniques that are used for physical assessment are inspection, palpation, percussion and auscultation. Inspection is a visual examination of the patient; palpation is done when the person doing the assessment places their fingers on the body to determine things like swelling, masses, and areas of pain. Palpation can include light and deep palpation. Deep palpation is cautiously done after light palpation when necessary because the client's responses to deep palpation may include their tightening of the abdominal muscles, for example, which will make the light palpation less effective for this assessment, particularly if an area of pain or tenderness has been palpated.

Percussion is tapping the patient's bodily surfaces and hearing the resulting sounds to determine the presence of things like air and solid masses affecting internal organs. The sounds that are heard with percussion are resonance which is a hollow sound, flatness which is typically hear over solid things like bone, hyper resonance which is a loud booming sound, and tympany which is a drum type sound.

Lastly, auscultation is listening to an area of the body using a stethoscope. For example, bowel sounds, lung sounds and heart sounds are auscultated with a stethoscope. The sounds that are heard with auscultation are classified and described according to their duration, pitch, intensity and quality. For example, the duration of a breath sound can be described in terms of seconds of duration or it can be described as having a longer duration of inspiration than expiration. The intensity can be describe as loud or soft and quiet; the pitch is described as a high pitched sound to a dull and low pitched sound.

An account of a patient that puts his or her illness or behaviour. A social history may include aspects of the patient's developmental, family, and medical history, as well as relevant information about life events, social class, race, religion, and occupation.