Physicians’ Experiences of Touch, a Hermeneutic Reflection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Touch is central to clinical practice but can be a “touchy subject” in medical education, simultaneously associated with care, and risk. In the clinical literature, touch is typically categorised as communicative or procedural, with an emphasis on touch as behavioural. Philosophically, touch is also a subject of consideration, yet this literature remains relatively unfamiliar to clinicians. In this essay, I reflect on touch in healthcare and medical education, as explored in my PhD studies, drawing on the work of hermeneutic philosophers, particularly Merleau-Ponty. Interpreting touch, I propose, is inherently hermeneutic, offering many possibilities to deepen our understanding of human interaction and clinical practice. Touch embodies the clinician-patient relationship as a holistic encounter. In high intensity interactions, touch orientates expression of empathy “beyond words". I present the significance of hermeneutics for clinical education, to richly re-imagine, and challenge, the concept of patient-centredness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it