When Medicine Stops Touching: The Cost of Clinical Distance

When Touch Left the Exam Room

Patients are noticing. They describe their visits as efficient but impersonal—no exam, no stethoscope, just the  screen in the corner, and the healthcare professional in front of it.

I had two conversations this last week who said something to me about this situation.

First, in a conversation with my dad. I asked about his annual visit—routine labs, quick check-in, the usual.
He paused, then said, “You know…he never even touched me. He just said, ‘Looking good. See you a year from now,’ and walked out.”

A few days later, I was hiking with a friend, 78 years old, sharp and funny. She said, “You know, Joy—it’s so hard to find a primary care doctor who’s actually interested in me. They see that I’m older, put me on auto-pilot, refill my meds, ask if I have throw rugs at home (and tell me to get rid of them–a tripping risk)—and not one touch.”

Both of them said the same thing, in different words: there’s no contact. No connection.

A recent study in BMJ Open found the same theme echoed across hundreds of patient interviews. When general practitioners stopped using touch, patients interpreted it not as professionalism, but as distance—as a loss of connection and care.

How did one of medicine’s oldest diagnostic and therapeutic tools become optional?

What the Research Shows About Touch

Across decades of studies, touch has been shown to influence measurable physiological and psychological outcomes:

• Reduces pain, anxiety, and depression. A meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour (2024) found that human touch—whether from clinicians or caregivers—modulates stress hormones and pain perception through oxytocin release.

• Improves communication and satisfaction. A 2025 Systematic Reviews analysis concluded that appropriate clinician touch enhances empathy, emotional regulation, and patient adherence.

• Supports physiologic regulation. Even brief, non-invasive touch stabilizes heart-rate variability and lowers cortisol, indicators of autonomic balance.

• Enhances diagnostic accuracy. The traditional physical exam—palpation, inspection, auscultation—was designed not just to detect, but to understand a patient’s state. The less we touch, the more we rely on data to tell the story. The thing is, touch used to provide us a great  big piece of the diagnostic  story.

How We Got Here

Healthcare didn’t abandon touch out of indifference—I think it happened in the name of efficiency.
Electronic records, productivity targets, and defensive documentation turned the clinical encounter into a workflow.

At the same time, diagnostic technology exploded. There’s a test or scan for nearly everything now—blood panels, imaging, genetic screens—each more precise and data-rich than the last. Many clinicians began to believe that the numbers could tell the whole story.

But they don’t. (In my humble opinion).

A trained hand can still detect what a lab value cannot: the texture of tissue, the tension of muscle, the subtle change in temperature that signals inflammation or infection. Touch gives information that can’t be digitized. It’s a way of listening—and when we stop using it, we “hear”  less.

Touch doesn’t fit neatly into an electronic record. There’s no billing code for it, no metric to capture it. But for patients, its absence leaves something missing: the sense that care is being offered, not processed.

A Healthcare System Stretched Thin

To be fair, much of this isn’t the fault of individual doctors. The system itself has changed.
Layers of regulation, documentation, and liability have reshaped the medical visit into a compliance exercise. There are boxes to check for safety, risk, demographics, billing—each one well-intentioned, but collectively consuming.

The science isn’t gone.
It’s just lost touch.

Why It Matters

Humans are wired for connection. The absence of touch isn’t just symbolic—it changes physiology. It heightens sympathetic tone, increases pain perception, and undermines a patient’s felt sense of safety.

Most people don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. They just know something’s not right.

“He never even touched me.”

That sentence says more about modern medicine than any policy report ever could.

I hope we can find our way back to the reality that trained hands are fitted for both discovery and calm.
They palpate. They soothe. They listen. They care.

Let’s not tech ourselves out of the beauty of connection—and the power of touch.

•••••

References

1. Packheiser J et al. Nature Human Behaviour, 2024. “Meta-analysis of the effects of human touch on health outcomes.”

2. Devillers S et al. BMJ Open, 2023. “Patients’ experiences of being touched by their general practitioner.”

3. Buono M et al. Systematic Reviews, 2025. “Touch, communication and affect: a systematic review on the use of touch in healthcare professions.”

4. Kelly K et al. Academic Medicine, 2020. “A Qualitative Inquiry of Physician Touch in Medical Education.”