Being Vulnerable: A Qualitative Inquiry of Physician Touch in Medical Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Effective nonverbal communication is associated with empathic behavior and improved patient outcomes. Touch, as a form of nonverbal communication, is relatively unexplored in medical education. This study sought to gain in-depth insights into physicians' experiences communicating with touch and to examine how these insights could inform communication skills curricula. METHOD: Collaborative inquiry, a form of action research, was used. Six experienced physician-educators from the University of Calgary met 8 times between 2015 and 2018 to critically reflect on their experiences of touch in clinical practice, teaching, and learning. Data comprised meeting transcripts, individual narrative accounts, and digital recordings of role-plays. Interpretative phenomenology, the study of lived experience, guided analysis. RESULTS: Two themes were identified-touch as presence and touch as risk. Participants used touch to demonstrate presence and a shared humanity with patients, to express "being with" a patient. Risk was not associated with the physical experience of touch but, rather, with its social meaning, interpreted through gender, culture, relationships, and context. Individual experiences were open to many interpretations. Participants expressed tension between their personal experience communicating with touch to express empathy and formal curricular structures. Reflection, role-modeling, and clinical debriefs were suggested as ways to encourage situational awareness and sensitive use of touch. CONCLUSIONS: Touch is a powerful means to communicate with patients but is highly subjective. Rather than avoiding touch for fear of misinterpretation, encouraging dialogue about its complexity could promote a more balanced understanding of touch and its potential to convey empathy and help physicians more effectively manage risk when using touch.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".