Back to School...

Well it's been a relatively uneventful but (as usual) very quick holiday, even though this one lasted a whole month. My call for extra temporary students for my little part-time tutoring thing pretty much failed, helped by my site's web server downtime (a week or so), and managing to hit one interested person, but not having his message until a few days ago (and thus pointless, because by then I had things arranged for the last few days of the holidays). I spent most of my holidays away from medicine, trying movies (a korean mystery named Mother), music (Adele's 19 album) and even going back to some books (John Marsden's Letters from the Inside is, in my opinion, worth a mention). One thing I did not stray away from was stethoscopes. Worrying about which stethoscope to get is probably equivalent, in med school, to worrying about which pens to buy for the HSC. But, frivolous as it was, I spent hours upon hours doing as much research as possible into the little pet topic of interest amongst med students. And finally, after all the blood, sweat, toil and tears, I made a decision: the Australian company 'Cumpers & Robbins' Trikoph (??) Cardiology (!) Stethoscope (a very important point to note) in Navy blue colour (an important decision, or so I heard, which I made in about 10 seconds). At $160, it certainly wasn't cheap (found a 10% discount voucher - 'Supporter5' for the store, Medshop Australia, which dropped the total cost plus shipping to $151) but it was certainly within my price range. Amongst others, I had the Littmann Master Classic II (single-head, single-lumen, standard diaphragm), Spirit Cardiology (single-lumen and standard diaphragm) and the good old Littmann Classic II SE, for which I was particularly enticed when I saw the 'FREE PENLIGHT' offer at Medisave.

Some key pointers from people I asked (doctors, cardiologist registrars and a few others) and what I gathered online about stethoscopes:
- Soft ear-tips apparently make a world of difference.
- They last a while. A long while. But they often 'grow legs' when unsupervised.
- One of my cousins is doing well as a doc with a Littmann Classic II.
- Brand-name appears to have minimal effect on steths, but Littmanns are far and away the most popular (by which reasons, I have not found out)
- The cheapest cardiology steths (from a decent brand) are better-sounding than the most expensive classic steths. I'm not too sure about this, and it will be one of the key things I'll be testing for with my steth.
- Single lumen vs double lumen tubing - contradictory anecdotes about this, but double lumens are quite standard in cardiology stethoscopes (although mine doesn't.....)
- Floating Diaphragm, Tunable Diaphragm, Floating Tunable Diaphragms, Bells, Paediatrics Diaphragms and Bells, etc etc. - Apparently, only C&R and Littmann have floating diaphragm factories. Hmm... this allows you to vary the frequencies of sounds you hear depending on the effort you push on the head of the steth. Once again, contradictory anecdotes found on the net regarding whether this is a good or a bad thing (having zilch experience, I'm sitting on the fence in regards to this)
- Length of tubing - Once again, contradictory anecdotes, some say longer allows you to not invade the patient's 'private space', whilst others say shorter allows you to hear better - I would side with the shorter team, since 22 inches (relatively short amongst all the 27 inch ones) is pretty much the length from your ears to the slightly bent arm anyway. Having said that however, I don't think it is a crucial difference - its hard enough to find 22 inches as it is.

I found that there was virtually no information for brands other than Littmann or Welch-Allyn, so, in the spirit of the medical student guinea pig, I will be reporting the results of my Trikoph stethoscope, and see whether it measures up to others (via the help of some colleagues).

You may ask 'why a stethoscope in the middle of the year?' to which I would reply 'because I didn't need it in the first semester', to which you may reply 'you don't need it in the second semester either' to which I would reply 'my friend said we did, and I want to get one soon anyway'. I was also shopping for books and might get a penlight - not just for med, but for computer repairs and upgrades (quite handy to see where jumpers are without taking out the disk drive - if you don't know what jumpers are, ignore this whole thing). But for now, am looking forward to another exciting semester of hard-core medicine, so sayonara holidays!