Yep, a blog that’s all about home medical thermometers.
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Yep, a blog that’s all about home medical thermometers.
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Buyers Guide to the Best Health ThermometerA digital home medical thermometer is becoming a standard family accessory. Unfortunately, it is not easy to find objective reviews of thermometers (or of most other personal health monitor products) on the internet. This article is intended as a list of sites that will guide you.
Consumer Reports in October 2005 reported on thermometers, but the full survey is available to subscribers only. A press release is here. The report found:
The more expensive ear thermometers take a reading in just one second. However, Consumer Reports found the readings might not be reliable….The forehead thermometer from Exergen is slid across the forehead to get a temperature. Yet at $50, it is also pricey and was not especially precise. The $10 Accu-Beep digital thermometer from BD did the best job. It beeps when properly placed under the tongue and gives an accurate reading in sixty seconds. If you want a thermometer reading even faster, Consumer Reports found two other very good performers that cost $13. They are the Vick's Comfort-Flex and Omron 20 Seconds Digital. Both thermometers will give a reading in 30 seconds or less.
Commercial sites like Amazon and Epinions include user reviews.
Medical sites – and some others – contain a lot of introductory information on temperature, on thermometers and on how to use them.
At WebMD Health is a long article, “Body temperature,” including an outline of the different types of thermometer and how to use them correctly, and HealthTouch Online has an article, “How to take an oral temperature.” At Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center is quite a detailed report, “Fever, how to take the temperature.”
The eHow website includes a series of basic instruction sheets:
How to use a rectal thermometer How to use a digital ear thermometer How to chart your basal body termperature
Ear Thermometers
A short article is at the How Stuff Works website, titled “How do ear thermometers work?” A lot of technical detail on ear thermometers is at HyperPhysics, a Georgia State University site. The iVillage: Pregnancy and Parenting site contains a doctor’s article, “Are ear thermometers accurate?” See also the Braun company website.
Babies
A comprehensive article at the Baby Center site discusses “How to take your baby’s temperature.” Another article is titled “What kind of thermometer is the most accurate?” The Yale Medical Group has a useful article, “Measuring a baby’s termperature.”
A 2001 Harvard Medical School study found rectal thermometers to be most accurate when measuring baby temperatures. An interesting article talks about a design award for a Vicks baby thermometer.
Basal Thermometers
Many women’s and pregnancy websites discuss these. An example is the Sister Zeus site. The Beyond Fertility commercial site offers an article, “Do I need a basal thermometer?”
Companies
This site contains a lot of information, including a comprehensive and useful article, titled Accuracy, which discusses such topics as the different types of thermometers, their accuracy and factors that can give false readings.
Exergen provides a considerable amount of detail on its non-invasive thermometer products.
This site highlights the company’s basal thermometers and it provides downloadable fertility/BBT charts.
An introduction to the company’s products.
An outline of the company’s products.
Omron introduces its products and also includes information on fevers.
You can find here an
introduction to the company’s products. |