[Nonverbal communication by the presurgical patient]

Throughout human history, besides oral language, man has used other forms of communication which are known as non-verbal. From the three components of the basic structure of human communication, language, paralanguage and kinesthesia, we have chosen the last one, kinesthesia, to develop our project. Kinesthesia studies the gestures, mannerisms and postures, or in other words all body movements and positions which occur as part of our speech or independent to it. This project proposes to analyze presurgical patients' kinesthetic manifestations. We have observed that some patients do not verbally express their fears, anxieties, nervousness, etc; nonetheless, bodies do respond with similar gestures and movements in persons of varying age, sex, socio-cultural level and pathology. It is difficult to be certain what another human being feels at any given moment. One may ask a person, but he/she can refuse to answer, he/she can lie or maybe he/she does not even know what his/her feeling is. In spite of the fact that the level of information a patient possesses is higher all the time, since this is one of the primary objectives all health professionals have, one doubt remains: Will a person who has all the possible information regarding his/her surgery at his/her disposition feel the same degree of anxiety as the person who does not have such complete information available to him/her?