Not to mention, while fetal dopplers appear on their face to be easy to use, the complexities of the human body mean they’re harder to wield correctly than you might think. “I knew the limitations of my remote guidance about what to do with that.” Plus, “there’s very little you can do based on what you hear on the doppler.” Even with Rajan providing information from afar, she isn’t comfortable with it, she says. Number two, I definitely didn’t want her to miss going to the hospital or the doctor when she needed to because she had falsely reassured herself,” she says. “I felt like it was more likely to cause her anxiety because she was hearing something that was wrong, number one. Rajan’s trepidation comes from two angles: that patients will be falsely reassured by what they think is their baby’s heartbeat when the baby is, in fact, in danger and that patients will not be able to hear their baby’s heartbeat and panic when everything is actually fine.ĭuring the toughest days of the pandemic when prenatal visits were hard to secure, says Rajan, she had personal connections in her life ask her if she should use a fetal doppler at home. “It’s a bad idea” for patients to use a fetal doppler at home, says Priya Rajan, MD, an associate professor of maternal-fetal medicine and the medical director of diagnostic ultrasound at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Patients with normal pregnancies usually see their doctor or midwife once a month until week 28 or so the wait between visits can be difficult and occasionally anxiety-inducing.Ī fetal doppler can feel like a straightforward way to check in on the baby and make sure his or her heart is beating like it should.
Especially in the early weeks, before you’re showing and perhaps before you’ve seen your doctor (in the U.S., you typically get in to see an obstetrician or a midwife around eight weeks into your pregnancy), it can be agonizing not to know exactly what is happening in there. It’s easy to find online it’s easy enough to put the ultrasound gel and the transducer to your abdomen and it’s easy to understand why people would want to use these devices.
The fetal doppler, at first sight, is a trifecta of ease. But that doesn’t mean that you can use one at home as easily as a trained ultrasound technician, doctor, or nurse uses one in the doctor’s office. The fetal doppler your doctor uses is pretty much the same as the one you can buy online and use at home-so similar, in fact, that Alexander says that if her office ran out of them, they’d probably just order more on Amazon.
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That’s the basic principles of how these devices work and why they’re so simple and inexpensive-because there’s not a lot of integrated circuitry or software that’s required.” “If it’s focused on the heart, it sounds like a galloping horse because the valves of the heart are moving. And the difference in the shifts causes the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh that you hear when you’re listening,” he says. “It’s an ultrasound that doesn’t have a picture,” says Tamika Alexander, MD, an obstetrician and an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. “Blood is going through the blood vessels and through the heart, and that’s what it’s picking up and that’s the sound that we hear.”ĭopplers are small handheld devices with a ’90s vibe: a small, often off-white plastic box with a simple screen and a wand, called a transducer, that the wielder drags over the belly in search of the baby’s heartbeat.Īccording to Joshua Copel, MD, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., the device has two primary components (called “crystals”), one of which “is constantly sending out sound the other is constantly listening to the returning sound. Dopplers reflect high-frequency sound waves-aka ultrasounds-off the blood to approximate the sound of blood flowing through the veins. Fetal dopplers are a type of ultrasound machine that uses sound waves to “listen” to a baby’s heart.
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