
1. Review
my insurance information
2. Measure
my weight
3. Measure
my temperature
4. Measure my blood pressure
What seemed strange to me was that all of these
physicians are linked into some sort of group practice and further strange they
all purport that they have a shared electronic record. A fifth piec e of information that was
requested by each of the eight different practitioners was a copy of the medications
I take. I have a three page written
copy, which breaks out the individual medications and dosages of any multiple
vitamins or supplements. Some of these
requests came within 24 hours of each other.
This experience, plus all the news regarding quarantine
of suspected Ebola patients got me thinking of how thermometers have evolved
over my lifetime.
I can’t remember much about thermometers until after
the end of WWII, when my father returned from the Pacific and we returned back
to Mason City, Iowa where he had left his dental practice. Thermometers at that time were based on
expansion of a material by heat and, depending on the portal they used to evaluate,
had a small or medium-sized bulb of mercury, a material I used to use to make dimes shiny when I visited my father's dental office.
Once I was old enough to safely hold one under my
tongue I was trusted to use the smaller bulb variety. I may still have had a twenty year-old sample
in my medicine cabinet when, the environmental agencies declared all of these
were hazardous and should discarded for safer models.
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Add caption |
Thermometers
are nothing new. The Greeks and Egyptians
had some method of measuring temperatures, more for scientific reasons than for
health, and Galileo built a model that measures ambient air effectively and
accurately. I have a Galileo thermometer
on my mantle, more as a work of art than a utilitarian piece.
I also have two combination barometer-thermometer
devises, one mounted on a wheel as a parallel piece to a chiming Ship’s Clock
and the other a remnant from when our rented house in Virginia was kept at a
frigid 66 degrees to save on heating costs..
I have an indoor-outdoor model that tells me when to open our California
home and an outdoor one to see if the combination one is accurate.
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Contact Thermometer |
All of these thermometers, and those presently in my
medicine cabinet depend on liquid expansion as a measuring mechanism. But there is new technology. Some current models depend on contact with
the skin to digitally read the temperature.
More than one of the offices I visited use that model. One would guess it would have appeal to
practices that treat small children. IO find it ironic that my mother used a similar technique by feeling my forehead, presumably with about the same degree of accuracy.
And there is a model that uses measurement of infra-red
waves. This is the one you see screening
West African travelers, since it keeps a safe distance from the person you are
testing.
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Infra-red Thermometer |
I am unsure what model is suggested for monitoring
exposed medical staff and contact persons twice a day for the twenty-one day
incubation period.
Treatment of what one does to a patient with an
elevated temperature varies greatly. Aspirin
was the only thing we had when I was growing up. Now there must be a dozen drugs in use. The movies (before they were called film) had
a scene where Jane Russell lay next to the fevered cowboy, presumable transferring
some of his heat to her. My older son,
with a temperature of 103° was advised by our flight surgeon that we should
bathe him in ice water and if the fever didn’t break on half an hour should
take him to the emergency room with the windows down to let in the cold Rhode
Island air. His suggestion to hold him
out said window was ignored by Mary.
One of the more interesting things I learned in my
medical training is that a fever is not a bad thing until it gets too
high. It provides a better opportunity
to incubate antibodies and is nature’s natural reaction to a problem in our
system.
Possibly inspired by my mention of my thermometers,
and possibly because we recently set our clocks back, I thin k my next Post
will be on clocks and how the ones I have, came into my life. I hope you will join me.
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