Ms Michelle Razo returns to the More Than Just A Hand podcast with host Blair Agero. This second episode is a direct continuation of the first, picking up the conversation where it left off. The first part traced her career across two health systems. This one turns to the idea that runs through her teaching and assessment work: proximity blindness.
The framework, in her own words
Proximity blindness is Ms Razo’s application of an established concept from attention research to upper limb clinical reasoning. It describes what happens when the obvious finding pulls a clinician’s focus so strongly that the real source of the problem, often sitting further along the kinetic chain, goes unseen. In the episode she works through how it shows up in day-to-day practice and why the immediate site of pain is so often the wrong place to stop looking.
Why it matters at the point of assessment
This is the reasoning that sits underneath a careful differential diagnosis rather than a quick label. Ms Razo unpacks how she guards against it in her own clinic, where an upper limb complaint is rarely allowed to be just one thing until the surrounding structures have been ruled in or out. Along the way she also explains Razo’s Kiss, another of the concepts she uses in her teaching. The full framing, and the examples she uses to teach it, are worth hearing in her own voice.
Listen to the episode
The full conversation is available on the podcast website and on Spotify. For more on Blair Agero’s work and the wider series, visit handtherapistblair.com.
For a full list of Ms Razo’s speaking, teaching and media engagements, see the speaking and media page.