Your pulse is an artery answering each heartbeat
Pulse is the rhythmic expansion of an artery as the heart cycles. Felt wherever a vessel can be pressed against bone or muscle—wrist, neck, groin, foot—it offers a quick bedside window on rate, rhythm, force, and vascular health.
Claudius Galen was among the first physiologists to describe it. Pressure waves from systole move compliant arterial walls enough to palpate; trained fingers can estimate systolic pressure that way, while diastolic pressure needs other tools. Rate is counted as beats per minute. In healthy people pulse and ECG heart rate nearly match, so the wrist often stands in for the heart—but pulse deficit appears when not every beat reaches the periphery, classically in atrial fibrillation when auscultated heart rate exceeds the felt arterial rate.
A normal pulse is regular in rhythm and force. Irregular patterns may reflect sinus arrhythmia, ectopy, atrial fibrillation or flutter, tachycardia, or heart block. Volume or amplitude tracks how widely the artery expands; a weak pulse suggests narrow pulse pressure from low output, shock, hypovolemia, or outflow obstruction, while a bounding pulse marks wide pressure from fever, anemia, thyrotoxicosis, fistula, or aortic regurgitation. Tension roughly mirrors diastolic pressure; contour distinguishes a quick rise-and-fall (celer) from a slow one (tardus).
Comparing sites adds clues: unequal radial pulses can signal coarctation, aortitis, dissection, or embolism; delayed femoral versus radial pulses also suggest coarctation. Named patterns include pulsus alternans in advancing systolic failure, paradoxus with exaggerated inspiratory pressure drop, bisferiens with two systolic peaks in some valve disease, and collapsing pulses in hyperdynamic states such as aortic regurgitation or patent ductus. Peripheral sites include radial, ulnar, brachial, femoral, popliteal, dorsalis pedis, and posterior tibial; central ones include carotid and femoral. Three-finger radial technique remains a classic teaching drill—index nearer the heart sensing tension, middle timing rate, ring judging volume.
Source: Pulse
