Do You Trust Your Thermometer?

Too bad they don’t make the old-school mercury ones anymore.

Rectal -- I swear by it.

I bought a Vick’s SpeedRead thermometer at Target in mid-March. 8 second read. It was around $7 so I picked up a spare in case the battery dies.

Have you used it R3?

I have the disposable paper ones. They’re hard to read. If they’re so hard to read, how do I know if they’re accurate? You put them in your mouth then try to figure out color of dots.

Yes r4, I use it every day. No fever.

I bought a digital one a couple of months ago, but was getting erratic readings. Then I searched the back of my linen closet and found an old first aid kit, in which I found an old mercury thermometer. Yay! Now I take my temperature every day with both, and the mercury one is far superior and more consistent.

I have one you slide across your forehead.

Doesn’t seem consistent.

I caught my thermometer cheating with my best friend. I don't think I can trust my thermometer ever again.

I got the special Plague Therm from Amazon. It flashes blue when you have the typical coronavirus temperature and it's time to go to the hospital.

I searched for a thermometer this afternoon and found nothing worth buying. There are cheaper ones but most of the better forehead/ear scanning ones are at least $80 bucks. Most over $100. Don’t feel like investing that much in a thermometer so checked out the old fashioned looking oral/anal/armpit ones. No more mercury. Now they run on batteries. Who knew? Last time I bought one was thirty years ago. So many terrible reviews! The main complaints were they were wildly inaccurate and/or the battery was dead or dying when received.

One thing I learned. Be careful to note if it registers in Fahrenheit in case you don’t know Celsius and don’t feel like looking up conversions at 3 AM with a pounding head.

Always remember this about Celsius.

In Fahrenheit, 98.6 is the accepted “normal” temperature. It fluctuates, so they picked 98.6 as normal.

In Celsius, 37 degrees = 98.6. So if you’re above 38 degrees, take out your cellphone & look up the equivalent.

OH for crissakes lets kill ourselves if a reliable thermometer costs 100 bucks. Ask your pharmacists which thermometer to buy and buy it. For like 10 to 20 bucks.

If your handy dandy pharmacist has them in stock. Which is not bloody likely otherwise people wouldn’t be wasting time on Amazon or fricking Walmart to buy a stupid thermometer! Get it?

I use a food thermometer. Seriously.

I have a "Bestmed" digital thermometer. Yes, I trust it. IIRC, I got it from CVS. Looks like this. The newer models look a bit different, though.

[quote] OH for crissakes lets kill ourselves if a reliable thermometer costs 100 bucks.

I would gladly spend $100 for a reliable thermometer. But read the reviews - they stop working at all or they’re totally inaccurate.

A mercury thermometer worked. You can’t buy one anymore. Everything is now badly made in China in order to rip you off and make you have to buy another one. And another one. Then another one. Planned obsolescent at least had products working reliably for a certain amount of time. Today’s products come off the Internet, take 6 weeks to get here and dint work right out of the box. They tell you to ship it back to them - the cost of shipping is only a little less than buying a new product.....so you buy a new product, hoping you got a lemon.

Anothe4 good thing about mercury thermometers - you could wash them in warm, soapy water, rinse them off, then pour some rubbing alcohol onto a tissue and rub it on the thermometer to disinfect it.

Mercury thermometers haven't been made in decades. For awhile, in the 1970s, they made them with colored water.

I'm so old, I still have the mercury thermo from when I was a kid.

I took a mercury thermometer from my mothers house after she died in 2015. Damned if I can find where I put it.

I have an old school Mercury one. I do trust it. My virtual PA provider laughed at it.

You can still get mercury thermometers on ebay.

Use a pulse oximeter for more accurate reading of your healthy, especially regarding covid-19.

My temp is always around 36 celcius. I'm a cool cat.

I have two, for some reason, in the bottom drawer of my bathroom cabinet. I never, ever get a fever so I have no reason why I own one, much less two thermometers. But there you go. They're both digital. I've used one. As far as I know, it's accurate. Apparently, our temperatures are normally higher at the end of the day than in the morning. Do most people notice a 'low grade fever'? Does a 'low grade fever' make you feel shivery or like you need to take off your sweater?

My good old reliable mercury thermometer must be at least 20 years old. Yours will turn up, R21.

When buying mercury thermometers, remember the elongated-head model is for oral use, the ball-headed one for rectal (pediatrics).

[quote] I took a mercury thermometer from my mothers house after she died in 2015. Damned if I can find where I put it.

Is it a rectal one?

In that case I think I know where it is.

I have a thermometer that I don’t trust. Because of my paranoid hypochondria I’ve been checking my temperature pretty regularly. It’s pretty consistent, but it always registers around 96.6. That’s why I don’t trust it.

That’s too low.