Once upon a time, back when I was between 11 and 13, I had a physical and the doctor used the stethoscope to listen to something on my back. After a while, he motioned his nurse over and had her listen too, asking her “what do you think?” to which she merely nodded.
Nothing was said to me or my parents about what that was about, and at that age I was too shy to speak up and ask them what they’d just agreed about.
However, when I was 20, I developed shortness of breath and a rash around the same time, and the nurse practitioner I saw snapped at me that of course I was short of breath while moving furniture (about 1/3 of my summer job with the college’s housing dept. involved moving dorm furniture) because I’m asthmatic; the rash turned out to be unrelated. No one ever mentioned that I had asthma before then - my mom didn’t know until then, either - but from the nurse practitioner’s tone I got the sense that this was a documented fact she’d already read about.
So, is that what the doctor and nurse picked up on? Mom once suggested it could also be a mild heart murmur since she had one herself, but is that really how you diagnose a heart murmur, listening to one’s back? A couple of webpages suggest they can be detected that way as well as asthma, but…
As for asthma, do an asthmatic person’s lungs always sound different than a person without’s? It has gotten more obvious that I have asthma as I’ve gotten older, but I was just there for a physical and not having trouble breathing at the time, and I can’t remember having any issues breathing at all until I was in high school and forced to run in gym class.
if they were listening to your back, they were listening to your lungs. If you had asthma they probably heard wheezes. Did you have an inhaler or any meds? I run into patients frequently who don’t know diagnoses such as asthma, not sure if their doctor never actually told them the diagnosis or they weren’t listening. For instance, 50 year+ smokers who are ASTOUNDED to learn they have COPD.
No, an asthmatic person’s lungs won’t necessarily sound any different from a non-asthmatic’s lungs unless their asthma is acting up. But if I hear a slight wheeze, an asthmatic is more likely to tell me they’re breathing fine, because they become accustomed to breathing with a mild restriction. If a person without asthma is wheezing even a little bit, they’re usually complaining about it.
They might have heard a mild wheeze that wasn’t making it hard for you to breathe. Except that wheezes aren’t all that exciting, and not usually something we point out to each other, unless one of us is a student. Murmurs are more rare, harder to hear unless you hear a lot of them, and more likely to make me wave to another nurse and say, “Hey, listen to this!”
But it would be really weird for them to put a diagnosis in your file and not tell your mom about it.
All of this is total supposition based on your OP.
The “nurse” could have been a student, medical or nursing, and the Dr was just asking “what do you hear?”. If that was the case, then they weren’t necessarily hearing anything abnormal.
Or as WhyNot pointed out they could have heard a mild wheeze but as you weren’t complaining of anything they didn’t mention it. Many things can result in a transient wheeze.
I would be very surprised if a NP at your college had any knowledge of this. Even with electronic medical records, transfers between a PCP and anyone else is rare with healthy people. It is possible that your college requested your childhood records as part of your admit packet but I’ve never heard of that happening.
Lastly you can hear lots of things from lots of places on children. With small children, part of listening is isolating all the different sounds coming from one place.
Might not be so unlikely for them to rule out a diagnosis based on the NP’s opinion, and that to never make it into the chart. In other words, the doc says “What do you think?” and the NP says “sounds normal to me”, and that’s it- no note in the chart or anything.
The stethoscope is usually placed on the front of the chest to listen to the heart. You can move it around to focus on the four valves and carotid arteries. I listen for heart rate, extra sounds, splitting sounds, systolic and diastolic murmurs suggesting stenosis or regurgitation, venous hum, carotid bruits…
At the back, more likely listening to lung sounds in inspiration and expiration. You can hear wheezing, fluid on the lungs (crackles due to heart failure, etc.), consolidation due to pneumonia (etc), breathing rate, weird patterns of breathing… When combined with a few other simple tests and oxygen levels you can get a surprising amount of information.