Practice patterns of teaching testicular self-examination to adolescent patients.

Testicular self-examination has been proposed as a screening technique for the early detection of testicular neoplasms. Previous work suggests that few adolescent males have received instruction in the technique. We report the results of a physician survey to assess the frequency with which self-examination is taught and to identify the reasons why some physicians do not teach testicular self-examination. Only 17.5% of the physicians surveyed taught testicular self-examination to adolescent male patients on a routine basis. Eighty-two percent stated that they were unfamiliar with the technique or had not thought about it.