Questions about Palpation/Cadaver Lab

[dpthopeful14788]

Hey everyone

I'm about to start my first year of PT school next week and I'm both really excited and really nervous!

I was just wondering if anyone had any advice about palp/cadaver lab. For some reason, I feel like I'm going to struggle with palp lab as I find myself always struggling to palpate myself or my boyfriend when going over notes, obviously I've never really had experience doing much of it, but I still feel like I'm never I'm hitting where I need to be. Any tips?

I'm also concerned about cadaver lab because I've only ever learned anatomy from images with clear start and end points and obviously a real human body will not be exactly the same. My professors have uploaded some photos for us to start looking over before our first lab day and I'm already panicking hahahah. Any advice with this would be great also.

Thanks!

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[honeybadger_PT]

First year, soon to be 2nd year, DPT student here. I still haven't had a ton of practice with palpation yet because of covid, but all of our professors have told us that it just comes with practice. Overtime, you will realize your fingers are able to pick up certain landmarks that before you couldn't feel. Just give it time and try your best. If I couldn't directly find what I was trying to palpate, I would locate the more pronounced landmarks near it and then just move towards the area I know it should be in. And for cadaver's, I sadly had do anatomy online during DPT school, but during undergrad I worked with lots of cadavers and my advice is to first figure out where you are in the body. If you don't take a second to pause to figure that out, it can get very confusing and you can easily make a mistake. And also for arteries, veins, and nerves, always ALWAYS trace them back to their origin or where they are supplying blood too. That is the best way to identify what you are looking at since different bodies have different variations, like the dorsal scapular artery on one body could be coming off the subclavian artery, but in another it could be coming off the transverse cervical artery. But, as long as you know what the dorsal scapular artery supplies and trace it to that, you can identify it even with this variation. I hope this was helpful. And you can do the same more muscles too, just follow the muscle belly to the origin and insertion.

 

[prePTprep]

Hey everyone

I'm about to start my first year of PT school next week and I'm both really excited and really nervous!

I was just wondering if anyone had any advice about palp/cadaver lab. For some reason, I feel like I'm going to struggle with palp lab as I find myself always struggling to palpate myself or my boyfriend when going over notes, obviously I've never really had experience doing much of it, but I still feel like I'm never I'm hitting where I need to be. Any tips?

I'm also concerned about cadaver lab because I've only ever learned anatomy from images with clear start and end points and obviously a real human body will not be exactly the same. My professors have uploaded some photos for us to start looking over before our first lab day and I'm already panicking hahahah. Any advice with this would be great also.

Thanks!

When I started PT school, I didn't have any experience with palpation and cadaver lab (my univ didn't offer a human anatomy lab in undergrad at the time)... Palpation just takes practice. Our school also had skeleton models at school and at the health science library so I often would use those while practicing palpation since I'm more of a visual learner. Don't worry if you don't know everything the first day - you aren't expected to... and many of your classmates will be in the same shoes (with little palpation and/or cadaver experience esp since many schools weren't in person 2/2 covid)

 

[kdubz7w7]

Hey everyone

I'm about to start my first year of PT school next week and I'm both really excited and really nervous!

I was just wondering if anyone had any advice about palp/cadaver lab. For some reason, I feel like I'm going to struggle with palp lab as I find myself always struggling to palpate myself or my boyfriend when going over notes, obviously I've never really had experience doing much of it, but I still feel like I'm never I'm hitting where I need to be. Any tips?

I'm also concerned about cadaver lab because I've only ever learned anatomy from images with clear start and end points and obviously a real human body will not be exactly the same. My professors have uploaded some photos for us to start looking over before our first lab day and I'm already panicking hahahah. Any advice with this would be great also.

Thanks!

Stop worrying! You haven't even started yet Your professors will have lots of tips and tricks to help you learn, and you and your classmates will lean on each other and also share things that are working for them. It'll come together. Almost everyone struggles with these things when they start and figure it out. For palp, a teacher and also classmates will guide you along in a "can you feel this" and place your fingers specifically type fashion, and anatomy will be easier to learn from an actual body because 1) you'll do the actual dissection and will see all the layers unfold and 2) photos are awful, structures are much easier to identify in the context of the entire body.

Just try to relax until school starts, try to not worry about things that will take care of themselves or may even end up being a total non-issue!