Do you need a stethoscope at home?
Everyone knows what a stethoscope is, and for those who have forgotten, we remind you that this is such a thing, two ends of which the doctor inserts into his ears, and the third one applies to your chest or back when you catch a cold. The stethoscope is the elder brother of the phonendoscope, do you remember that Dr. Aibolit had such a tube, narrow in the middle and widening at the ends? It was he. Although "was" is not entirely correct, it is still used in some places, such as obstetrics. Or in a movie about old times.
But why does a doctor apply a cold cardiological stethoscope to a shivering patient (by the way, the difference between a good doctor and an ordinary one is that he first warms up the part he is going to apply to you)? This technique is called auscultation in medicine. The fact is that the body is very noisy. If this noise were amplified, it would look like a highway in a big city at rush hour. Heart beats, intestines gurgle, breathing rustles. When a person gets sick, the noise of the organs is different from normal. In those days, when there was no high-precision diagnostics, a lot depended on the doctor's hearing, and the virtuoso doctors could say a lot about the disease by the changed tone of sound.
Now, despite the fact that hardware diagnostics are already quite developed, doctors still use a stethoscope. Mainly because it is reliable enough if you know how to use it, simple, fast and cheap. After all, you cannot drag a diagnostic laboratory to calls, and you put a stethoscope in a pocket of your dressing gown or a suitcase, so the diagnosis is with you.
The accuracy of this diagnosis depends on two things: the quality of the stethoscope, and the doctor's auscultation skills. There are usually no problems with the former, since modern stethoscopes can be used as spy equipment, so well they allow you to hear what is usually difficult to hear. With the second, everything is very individual, but in general it is also not bad, since now the doctor, with the help of a stethoscope, makes only a preliminary diagnosis, and clarifying studies will be carried out using equipment.
So, do you need a stethoscope at home? If you are a resident of foreign intelligence, then you definitely need it as a simple eavesdropping device that cannot be detected by any equipment. If you are not, and your goals are strictly medical, then it all depends on whether you know what to hear. If you don't know, the stethoscope is useless. If you know, it might come in handy. And if you don't know, but really want to learn to be a doctor and find out, then you simply cannot do without a stethoscope.
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