Long story short, my daughter and I have been a bit crook over the last couple of weeks. Took our temps, both registering over 38.3 consistently. We went for Covid 19 testing last week, and both of us came back negative.
Aaaanyway, we’ve still been experiencing low-grade fevers, but our thermometer decided to cark it this morning JUST before our Doc ordered further testing to find out why we were being weird etc. Our digital thermometer was not displaying our temps half the time, but when we took them earlier, was still showing 38.5 +.
Whilst waiting to get into pathology, I walked into a pharmacist next door and bought a new thermometer. We had our blood tests, they are being sent off for all sorts of exotic diseases…
…and when we got home, I took my temp again with the new thermo it was normal!
So, question for you medical boffins. Can a digital oral thermometer register an incorrect reading (especially a higher than normal reading) when the battery is on the way out?
Because I feel like a right git now, giving my doc a ‘headache’ when there seems to be nothing the hell wrong with us at all. Fnark.
Anything can happen when the battery is low. It’s usually noticed when the results are far off and inconsistent, or it just shuts off, but it could happen. You were reading about 101F, a tough temperature to tell if you really have a fever or you’re just warmed up a bit, so maybe you didn’t really have any fever to start with.
OP seems to be blaming the inaccuracy on a low battery, but is that reasonable or just a guess. How old is the thermometer? Was it accurate in the past? As I see it, it might simply be a defective thermometer.
Since this involves a non-hypothetical medical situation, let’s move it to IMHO.
[Not moderating]
How would you know if the room temperature reading you’re getting is correct? You could test standard temperatures like icewater and boiling water, except that a thermometer designed to measure human body temperatures might not be calibrated for temperatures that far from its intended range, and might even be damaged by them.
Just because it’s digital doesn’t mean it’s accurate. When I bought my pellet smoker, while it had a probe inside the smoke chamber – that’s how it would know when to add more pellets to the firepot – it did not come with a thermometer to know what temperature the meat was at; that was in a model that was $700 more. Instead I bought for $20 a remote thermometer with a probe for the meat and a transmitter along with a receiver that would reach at least as far as the house so I could lounge around inside sipping my mint julep while waiting for the ribs to get done.
Needless to say, it was digital and at first everything was fine, but about a month after I got it, the probe’s reading started getting further and further off. This was noticeable because when turning the thing on, it would show 90[sup]o[/sup] when it wasn’t anywhere near that* and register much hotter than the display on the chamber’s thermometer even inside the meat.
The offset was pretty linear so I could calculate what to look for but after another month the difference was about 40[sup]o[/sup] which was getting to the limits you could set the receiver alarms for – the manufacturer undoubtedly figured not many people wanted their meat done to the point of 200[sup]o[/sup]. Since they had a lifetime ‘no questions’ warranty I contacted the manufacturer and they sent a replacement probe which I’ve been using for about two years without any problems.
It was a classic case of precision vs. accuracy. The original probe was pretty good at detecting the temperature delta – good enough for the purpose at least – but was crap at telling me what the temperature was. Calibration is still a thing even in this digital age.
*Yet. This was in April so ambient was still what Arizonans would consider “nice.”
I’ve never had a digital thermometer that would do this. They all just display — with a flashing F which is thermometer for “put it in your mouth, dummy.”