Medical Equipment – An Overview!

Medical equipments or instruments are those valuable tools that assist in diagnosing, monitoring and/or treatment of any medical conditions. In today’s life and age, it is impossible to survive without medical equipment and also with science and technology progressing with leaps and bounds, newer and newer medical equipments are being developed that aid in helping human life survive against the most dangerous of medical ailments.

There are different types of medical equipment in use today. Let us look at some of them.

Everyday use equipment

This category includes all those equipments and instruments that doctors and nurses normally use in their every day routine while attending to their patients. These tools may be extremely simple like stethoscopes, needles, syringes, latex gloves etc. They may also be complex like the newly developed autoclaves which are compact machines that are used to sterilize medical instruments before usage. They may also include the high tech medical examination tables as well as weighing scales and other such things that may sound simple but do require a fair share of maintenance.

Life Support Equipment

This category includes those advanced instruments and equipments that are used to keep a person’s organs functioning when the organs have failed. The life supporting equipment includes medical ventilators that supplies air in and out of the lungs, heart-lung machines, dialysis machines, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines etc.

Therapeutic Equipment

These are those equipments that are used once the surgery is over. These instruments help and aid patients in recovering as well as improving their health. They include equipments like medical lasers, infusion pumps (used to infuse the circulatory system with nutrients and medicines required for the body to heal and recover) and other such devices.

Diagnostic Equipment

Diagnostic equipment includes any type of instruments and devices with the function of helping physicians detect as well as diagnose problems or diseases in a patient. Some of the most commonly used diagnostic equipment would include ultrasound machines, CT scanners ( these are used to produce images of the person’s internal organs in order to detect signs of cancer or other such diseases) MRI machines( these use magnetic resonance technology in order to detect problems like internal injuries, tumors, infections etc and especially in the brain) and other such complex devices.

Every day thousands of physicians, nurses and other health care experts use a wide variety of such medical equipments in order to heal, save and improve the lives of millions of people. What we have covered in this article is just a brief overview of the thousands of different medical equipments that are in use today.