Not LCD, I’m talking about those thermometers you stick on your forehead and a row of squares change colour, the last square that changes colour indicates the corresponding temperature. I can’t find the body temperature type anymore, even on eBay. They only have those for brewing beer and aquariums.
I think their inaccuracy combined with the arrival of inexpensive battery operated thermometers did them in. I remember having one and my mother determining that my temperature was in the range of 96 to 102. Not really helpful.
Get yourself one of those laser/infrared thermometers. I love mine to pieces. It is much more precise, measures in a range of hundreds of degrees, and since there is no contact, germs are not spread.
I use it for cooking, checking for poorly insulated walls, measuring fevers. You can use it to check your engine temperature or the BBQ. It determined that my oven temperature was lower than the dial indicated. I’ve used it to compare the surface of my deck to the ambient winter temperature… a host of uses. It is also a handy cat toy.
Your SO can use the back of his/her hand against your forehead to test your temperature. That’s usually pretty accurate and if you’re not too sick can lead to some fun role playing.
Holy crap! I remember seeing one of these types of thermometers on the side of our fish aquarium when I was a wee lad! I haven’t thought about those old things in perhaps 20 years. Crazy. Thanks for asking this question!
That’s not accurate at all. Humans are good at sensing changes in temperature, but humans suck at measuring absolute temperature.
The classic way to prove this is to stick one hand in hot water and the other hand in cold water and let them both get used to it. Then stick both hands in lukewarm water. The water will feel warm to one hand and cool to the other, even though both hands are in the exact same water.
I haven’t done this with the “medical” ones, but with the aquarium version, if you go and look at several hanging on the rack at the store, you will see they can vary by several degrees. When I’d buy one, I’d just try to get one that seemed to be in the “middle” of the range of those on the rack - but no idea if that was accurate either.
A difference of a few degrees isn’t real critical in most aquariums (at least the type you’re going to buy this type of thermometer for), but when you’re trying to see if someone has a fever, there’s a big difference between 98 and 101, or 101 and 104. So I wouldn’t use one for medical use.
They were always meant for things like fish tanks or snake aquariums etc. They were briefly marketed as a very cheap, seemingly ‘high-tech’ (because of its faux-digital readout) fever thermometer in places like the impulse-buy sections of drug stores. But as others have said they are useless for reading human body temp. They aren’t accurate to much more than five or ten degrees and a fever temp needs to be accurate to around half a degree to be of much use.