Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Mixmaster Maisie. I'm a part-time DJ and a full-time beat fanatic. I also run a very successful tax preparation service for small businesses, but that's just my day job. When I'm not doing that, I'm looking for fresh new beats.
Like, the other day, I heard someone slurping up soup with a silver spoon. I thought to myself, Maisie, that's a groovy beat. So, I recorded it and turned it into this. BELL RINGS BELL RINGS BELL RINGS
Oh yeah, Mixmaster Maisie strikes again. One of my tax clients also happens to be my doctor, and the other day I was getting a checkup and she said she needed to listen to my heartbeat. She also asked if she could still apply for an electric vehicle tax break if she bought used. But mostly we talked about my sweet, sweet heartbeat. I thought to myself, Maisie, that's a beat you need to hear. But Doc said I would need a stethoscope. What?
What is a stethoscope anyway, and how does it work? Leona must be hunting for boss beats from the body too because they asked, how does a stethoscope work? I bet a doctor can answer this one. So a doctor or a nurse uses a stethoscope to listen. My name is Emma Gerstensang, and I'm a pediatrician in Philadelphia.
They use it to listen to your lungs, to your heart, to your belly, and see if anything sounds funny and makes a doctor or nurse think that you might be sick. How a stethoscope works is it allows sound to travel up a tube filled with air. You press it up against someone's chest, and then that amplifies the sound, makes the sound louder, and then the sound, which is basically just a vibration in air,
travels up that rubber tube. It allows you to listen to a really small area at a time. When all the sound waves come in, it kind of funnels them down. So it makes everything gather up into one area that travels up that tube. And it makes it a lot easier to hear a sound that would be hard to hear if you were just kind of pressing your ear up against someone's chest. So you put the diaphragm up against the chest or the belly.
You hear some noises from inside the body, right? Like your heart, every time it pumps, makes a boop-boop sound. And then that sound travels up the air-filled tube and then into the ear pieces that the person is listening to. The stethoscope was actually invented in France in 1816. And before that, if doctors wanted to listen, they would just put their ears right up against someone's chest.
So if you wanted to listen to their heart, you would just have to get really close to them. And after a little while, people decided they didn't want to do that anymore. And so they came up with a way to listen from a little bit further away. I use my stethoscope to listen to somebody's heart. And I actually listen in four different places on the chest to hear all the different sounds from the different parts of the heart.
And so your heart, a lot of blood is flowing through your heart. So when a lot of blood is flowing through your heart, it makes a sound. Just like if you turn on a faucet and you hear the sound of water coming out, I also use a stethoscope to listen to your lungs. So I listen on the back and I actually listen in three places on each side. And that's because your lung has three parts, the upper, middle, and lower part. And so as you move the stethoscope up and down your back, and someone might say, take a deep breath in,
take a deep breath out. And that's when you're listening to how air is flowing through the lungs. Um, um, uh,
Wowza! A stethoscope sounds like a real rad piece of analog audio equipment. It uses a round thing called a diaphragm to pick up faint little sounds and make them louder. Then, the sound travels up that rubbery tube to the earpieces. I gotta get one of those. I wonder if I could pay for it with my pre-tax health savings account since it's technically a medical device. Only one way to find out! Time to read up on Tax Law!
If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to scope up some more science, check out the Brains On podcast, where we have a whole episode all about how much the human brain can hold. Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes.
Search Brains on Universe on YouTube and subscribe. If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then. Turns out it is covered by my health savings account. Yes.