STAT October 31, 2023
Tarek Loubani looked around at his fellow doctors at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and realized he held one of just two stethoscopes in the room.
It was 2012, and he was treating patients injured during the recent clashes between Israel and Palestinian groups. Without stethoscopes, providers knelt down to patients’ chests to check if they were breathing. Loubani, an emergency room physician in Canada and Kuwait-born Palestinian refugee who regularly works in Gaza, wondered how health care workers could manage without one of medicine’s most basic tools; a cornerstone of triaging patients. Even his nephew’s toy plastic stethoscope was preferable.
The stethoscope — compared to 3M’s Littman stethoscopes in a validation study — became the inaugural device of...
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