Background Heart auscultation is a widely used and cost-effective clinical tool for detecting valvular heart disease (VHD), particularly in primary care. However, existing evidence on its diagnostic ...

In school children, cardiac auscultation by machine (Phonocardioscan) has shown promise as a screening procedure. To determine its effectiveness as a screening procedure in adults, results obtained by ...

When the doctor places that cold stethoscope on your chest, she’s listening for two distinct sounds – lub-DUB. “You can almost set your clock to what you are hearing,” said internist Mary Ann Kuzma.

Editor's Note: Before reading this article, it is recommended that readers first review "Nonauscultatory Cardiac Exam: Assessing the Elderly Person," previously published on Medscape. As with most ...

Listen to the heart We must not let time constraints and busy schedules eliminate the most important aspect of the patient encounter: human touch. When I was in nursing school, I was able to observe ...

IT IS possible that the existence of the heart sounds was known to Hippocrates 1 and even that he made use of his knowledge for diagnostic purposes, but William Harvey 2 seems to have been the first ...

When a doctor puts a stethoscope on a patient's chest, he or she usually asks the patient to breathe in deeply and breathe out slowly. This is quite common when a patient has a cold or serious cough: ...

Cardiac auscultation is a skill that is sadly unappreciated by many clinicians. There are a variety of reasons that account for this attitude. These include (1) the difficulty of learning auscultation ...