Is clinical examination dead?

“I tried to listen to some heart sounds last week. Couldn’t hear a thing.” So an eminent professor of medicine told me recently. “It’s all quackery, you know.”

This is something I’d thought for a while, but I’d not heard it summed up with such frankness. Although I continue to teach undergraduates the distinction between reverse and fixed splitting of the second heart sound, I have never detected these conditions myself. And I’ve got a strong suspicion that most cardiologists confidently declare “a clear case of a loud …