THE BEST STETHOSCOPE FOR YOU

Stethoscope Littmann is the most popular brand. Stethoscope Littmann has captured the stethoscope market in many countries. Of course, the Littmann's mentioned above are good. I have even used the Classic II. However they are certainly not the best stethoscopes.

The stethoscope traditionally used is the Sprague, developed more than 45 years ago. It is still considered to be the gold standard acoustic stethoscope, with an outstanding high to low range.  However, that being said, once you have learnt to recognize what is simply the tube sound, you'd be hard pressed to get better acoustics from any scope.

As a medical student, I owned a Littmann. However, when that got lost, for a time I used a Sprague I'd borrow from my seniors (all Cardiology fellows, and many med residents, at my institution own Spragues). I felt this was definitely a superior scope. Which in my personal opinion is the best acoustic scope out there.

The "traditional" scopes like the Spraguewere built in an era when bedside diagnosis was of paramount importance in medicine. I feel has helped me over the years to sharpen my clinical skill - you are forced to learn and understand the characteristics of each murmur, gallop, HS, etc... where's the best place to look for them, how they sound, their frequencies, their timing, what accentuates the murmur. I've noticed people who use the Littman just use the flat d - the claim is the patented "Littmann diaphragm" automatically turns into a bell if you release pressure on it. think this has lead to a certain laziness in many students - they don't take the trouble to properly learn cardiac sounds, and correlate what they learn in the books with what they hear in clinical practice. Because they don't hear much. Which in turn can discourage learning and correlating. It's a vicious cycle. It is not helped when they are taught by a generation of physicians who have themselves lost the art and skill of bedside diagnosis, and for whom the exam isn't important - only the thousand dollar test.