Red Cross Blogs

Death of the stethoscope

By Mark Cox
September 8, 2010 at 1:42 pm

So, farewell to the humble stethoscope. According to news reports, doctors are increasingly abandoning the iconic medical instrument in favour of a dinky new app on their iPhones that can monitor patients’ heartbeats.

Rumours that dentists also plan to start using Blackberries to extract teeth (apparently, three good bashes does the trick) are as yet unconfirmed, but surely it’s only a matter of time.

From childhood, I have an idealised view of what a doctor should be: a kindly gent in his fifties, a faint smell of Brylcream, off the cuff jokes, the mini-shock of the cold stethoscope on your chest. Against this, the idea of some spotty wee urchin, straight out of medical school, sticking an iPhone down my shirt really doesn’t cut it. But maybe that’s because technology scares me and I can’t even fathom my own TV remote.

And all the evidence suggests it really is a brave new world. More than three million – that’s three million – people have already downloaded the iStethoscope application, and 500 new users download it every day. What’s more, there are almost 6,000 health-related applications in the Apple App Store. Talk about a world of hypochondriacs.

Incidentally, my favourite app is the PMS Buddy, designed to help men predict the menstrual cycle – and potential mood swings – of their partner. And for women, there’s currently a ‘man-flu’ app in development, which correlates local weather forecasts and health statistics with general area levels of male wet-blanketness to come up with flu-likelihood projections. Actually, I made that second one up, but the fact that you believed it even for a minute shows how far we’ve come.

The serious point about the health apps, though, is they can help doctors – and ordinary punters – save lives when they’re on the move or in remote areas. In a nutshell, it’ s as though the trusty doctor’s bag has been squished into one very small phone.  Now anyone with an iPhone has access to reams of potentially life-saving first aid information, which can only be a good thing.

I’ll still miss the old stethoscope, though.

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Tags: Emergencies, First aid, first aid tips, first aid training

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