Why Are Stethoscopes Still a Thing?
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The value of a stethoscope comes not from the low-tech, lo-fi sounds that it picks up, but from the enormous knowledge base built up over hundreds of years and billions of examinations that allows a doctor to diagnose, say, mitral valve insufficiency, or pleural effusion, instantly.
By themselves, a muffled "whoosh" at a particular point in the cardiac cycle, or a particular kind of "rub" while breathing, mean nothing whatsoever. Any modern imaging technology could outperform the glorified tube of the stethoscope easily.
However, since we have built up an enormous database of clinical experience, it gives us a powerful ability to interpret otherwise useless sounds in a way that outperforms newer technologies for speed, efficiency, accessibility, and reliability.
If you arrive in ER with a pneumothorax, for example, you had better hope that there is someone waiting for you with a stethoscope to confirm the absence of breath sounds on the affected side. Even a handheld ultrasound may not be fast enough to get you a chest tube before you are irreversibly dead.
Simple tools like stethoscopes are critical to medical care precisely because they are so cheap, easy to use, flexible, reliable, portable, quick to deploy, and give a direct human connection between doctor and patient. Why would you ever want to replace it? Supplement, sure. Improve, absolutely.
A "cheap" portable ultrasound machine is going to be in the thousands of dollars, and there's just no way that hospitals and clinics would be able to purchase enough of them so that one was available for every ongoing PE- not to mention the fact that US is billed separately, and could easily double the patient's cost for a brief office visit.
Plain film x-rays and CT scans expose the patient to ionizing radiation, so that's not a practical option either.
MRI is expensive, time-consuming, and a lot of rural hospitals might not have a machine, or if they do, it's very, very unlikely that they're going to have staff available to operate it 24 hours a day.
All of these tools, including the stethoscope, have their own separate uses and applications- they are not competitors.
They still do "cling" to leeches for some treatments as well. Leeches are hard to beat for a few conditions. It's got a name : hirudotherapy, and sees application in skin related conditions and wound cleaning, and saves hundreds of legs and arms from amputation on a yearly basis and even sees use in cosmetic medicine. Cleaning skin and wounds the way leeches do is not impossible but takes experts hours or days and introduces risks that treatment with leeches does not.
Meanwhile, hammers, even in their various shapes and sizes, are more general purpose tools that "enhance" the skills and abilities of the human that wields it. Knowing how to use it also requires knowledge of the material you are working with.
Similarly, I'd say that stethoscopes are a general enhancement of a human sense (hearing), whereas other imaging techniques mentioned are more expensive, time-consuming, and specialised.
I know this is a flawed analogy, but I imagine somebody walking up to an electronics tech and saying "Hey, you don't need that oscilloscope anymore because we bought this thermal camera. Don't you know that oscilloscopes are old technology from the 19th century? Why, they didn't even know what electrons were back then!".