Survey on hand gestures relevance in patient practitioner communication: a homeopathic example

•Gestures play an important role in medical communication.•Studies mainly in the medical areas of homeopathy, general practice and psychotherapy examine hand gestures.•Sensation method homeopaths actively observe hand gestures.•They judge hand gestures to help patients in expressing their symptoms qualities and illness experience.•The results of our survey are highly congruent to findings on hand gestures from other domains.

BackgroundGestures play an important role in medical communication.Methods94 homeopaths (Mean age 49.6 years, 20% male) completed a 20-item questionnaire on utilization and relevance of gestures in patients' symptom description.ResultsAfter excluding nine items due to low validity (n = 4) or low item total correlation (n = 5), factor analysis of the questionnaire resulted in the following three dimensions explaining 66.6% of variance: ‘Hand gestures in relation to verbal expressions’ (5 items; Cronbach's α = 0.81), ‘Hand Gestures describing the experience of bodily and mental symptoms’ (4 items; Cronbach's α = 0.74) and ‘practitioners' behavior and active attitude in observing hand gestures’ (2 items; Cronbach's α = 0.86).ConclusionThe survey shows how homeopathic therapists view patients' hand gestures, whether they use these diagnostically and how this relates to their homeopathic practice. Practitioners with only homeopathic influence on this topic are highly congruent to findings on hand gestures from other domains.