By the way . . . the stethoscope is still a vital tool

TECHNOLOGY doesn’t frighten me, but I fear its a threat to the fate of that humble badge of doctors everywhere — the stethoscope.

A highly rated colleague recently suggested in a prestigious medical journal that training students to use a stethoscope is a waste of time.

Why, in this day of scans and other sophisticated diagnostic technologies, he asked, should anyone waste their time learning to use equipment that should be consigned to history?

But there is nothing obsolete about the stethoscope. The skills that medical students acquire during their five years at university, the focus on refining powers of observation, are invaluable, and as essential as ever.

A stethoscope allows us to ‘hear’ inside the body: used with the right training and experience, through it one can easily identify which patient with a cough has pneumonia, which has asthma, and who is coughing because they have a postnasal drip caused by sinus infection.

And, when listening to the heart, the stethoscope can reveal if the normal ‘lub-dup’ sound of the heartbeat has an extra ‘whoosh’, which is a sign that the main valve, the aortic valve, is narrowed.

This is a condition that can cause sudden death, so the patient would need further evaluation by a cardiologist. That assessment might save a life — thanks to use of a stethoscope. This is why I have such strong misgivings about any future in which general practice relies on the telephone and digital technologies for giving medical care. Can you get a decent haircut using kitchen scissors and watching a tutorial on YouTube? No. What you need is a skilled practitioner with the proper tools. The message is simple: old doesn’t mean obsolete.