How to Take Temperature for a Fever

Video Transcript

"DR. SUSAN JEWELL: Hello. My name is Dr. Susan Jewell. On behalf of Expert Village today, I'm going to talk to you about how to treat fevers. Now, in this clip I want to show you how to use the thermometer correctly and where to place the thermometer in the mouth, and also different areas that you could take the body temperature. Now, let's look at this diagram that I've drawn for you. Now, in this diagram, this is--this whole area represents the lower lip, so we have the lower lip here, and we've opened the mouth. So, for example, look at my mouth and you can see I'm looking, well, look at this, in that area, region of the lower mouth, so the lower lips lowered and here you could see this represents the tongue, and this row over here is the--it represents the teeth. Now, when you lift up your tongue, if you ever look in the mirror, you can see this like this fine tendon that sort of like splits the mouth into two halves. This half here and this half here, and then there is in the front part of the lower mouth region, you could see like two-two very deep pouches or cavities, and those are called the buccal cavities, and this is actually the area, these two areas here where I've shown you in the diagram--this is what blue represents, the thermometer--is where you should position the thermometer within these deep cavities, pouches in the mouth, in the lower jaw, because this is where all the blood vessels actually come to the surface, so you're going to get a good reading of the core temperature of the body, and that's a more accurate way to take the body's temperature. So in the next clip, I'll show you and demonstrate to you actually how to take the temperature with the thermometer and how to actually place it in the mouth, and also, in other areas of the body, to get accurate temperature reading."