Vital Signs - Video Lesson

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. In this short video, we're talking about vital signs in the context of medical imaging. So what are vital signs and why are they important? Vital signs help to evaluate the critical functions of the body. Vital signs don't tell us everything that could be going wrong, but they give us a baseline measurements of the overall health of our patients. So the first vital sign that we'll discuss is temperature. It's very common to evaluate the patient's oral temperature. For the average healthy adult, the temperature should be about ninety eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, but there are other ways to measure temperature. The tympanic temperature is usually one degree more. The axillary temperature in the armpit is usually one degree less than the oral temperature, and then the rectal temperature, which we try to avoid, is one degree more. So if you can remember the oral temperature of ninety eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, you can remember these other temperatures as well.