What Are the Uses of Stethoscopes?

Stethoscopes in today's modern medicine have changed much since their inception. Not only are they used to listen to heart and breath sounds, but have been widely used in orthopedics.

What are the Uses of Stethoscopes?

• The stethoscope is not only used for listening to the beating heart of a human, or the lungs and intestines. It is also used for listening to the flow of the blood in the surrounding area of the heart and the heartbeats of fetuses inside of pregnant women.

How Stethoscopes are Used

• A large number of stethoscopes are used by placing them directly on top of the skin of a patient. However, some stethoscopes work fine being placed above the surface of clothing that lies right on the skin, such as a shirt.

How Can a Stethoscope Help a Doctor?

• Stethoscopes help doctors determine abnormalities in breathing patterns, heartbeat patterns, intestinal movement and digestion. The use of a stethoscope helps to diagnose disorders or diseases in the body which can be detected by the sounds they make.

What is an Electronic Stethoscope?

• An electronic stethoscope is a device that detects the sounds in the body that cannot normally be heard by the use of a conventional stethoscope. Electronic stethoscopes do this by amplifying sounds that come from within the body in a general direction even further than a normal stethoscope would, by electronic means.

Fetoscope: Another Type of Stethoscope

• The fetoscope, also referred to as a fetal stethoscope, is shaped a bit differently than a stethoscope, and is used to detect sounds coming from a fetus. It is situated in the abdominal area of a pregnant woman to hear the fetus more clearly.