A Question For Doctors. "Turn your head and cough."

Factual Questions
1

So the Other Shoe and I were talking about, of all things, a doctor’s visit he had a few years ago when the Good Doctor cupped his junk and instructed him to turn his head and cough. He did so, and was apparently presumed to not be on death’s door.

He told me that later he re-created the scene in the privacy of his own home, cupping his own parts, coughing up a storm, trying to figure out what, exactly, the doctor was feeling for. This cracked me up, until I realized that, hey, I don’t know what the doctor was doing, either.

Subsequent Googling informed us that the Good Doctor was feeling for a hernia.

This brings me to two questions I have not been able to find the answers for, and I turn to the Good Dope to enlighten us:

  1. What do you (as a doctor) feel when someone’s got a hernia?
  2. Why TURN YOUR HEAD?!?

The latter is the true curiosity for us both. I suggested that maybe it’s not in a physician’s (and his patients’) best interests to have dudes coughing all over his head all day … but is there any other reason? What the heck does swiveling your neck do to your core muscles/intestinal wall/junk to make a hernia more apparent?

2

It’s the pressure from the cough that makes a hernia evident.

Don’t cough all over the doc.:slight_smile:

3

Or the furniture.

4

That. I was checked for a hernia once and I understood what coughing could indicate, but I didn’t understand why I had to turn my head. That was one of those “DUH” moments.

5

Just to be a little more explicit:

  1. The doctor will feel for the intestines pushing into the scrotum. I have actually felt this in a different type of hernia. My wife had pretty extensive abdominal surgery. About 25% of such cases can result in a hernia through the abdominal wall and the bulge can be felt on her stomach. When she coughs, you can definitely tell (both by touch and sight) that there’s tissue pushing through the little gap. You wouldn’t even need to be a doctor or know about hernias to think “Hmmm… that’s just not right.”

  2. You turn your head so you’re not coughing all over the doctor. It’s bad enough for them that they’ve got to be holding your privates. :slight_smile:

6

So THAT’s why all the furniture is arranged behind the doctor…