While handling patients with heart problems or intermittent chest pains, physicians will sometimes order the Holter Monitor. The reason they do this is to know whether the prescribed medicine is working or if the patient’s heart is receiving enough oxygen to go about its job of pumping blood. In order to get the best results out of this test, patients have some instructions that they ought to follow since the monitor will wrapped on their chest for up to 48 hours. What exactly are these instructions and what is their importance? This essay will discuss the main instructions that a patient should follow in order to get accurate results.
The first instruction to the patient who already has the Holter Monitor in place will be how to take care of the instrument. For accuracy in results, the monitor should remain functional over the whole period of recording. The machine should be kept dry the entire time. This, therefore, means that the patient should not take a shower or take part in any form of activity that may wet the instrument. Since it’s an electrical device, contact with water may short the circuits and hence lead to damage of its electrical parts. This will therefore cut short the test and no useful results will be recorded.
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Another most important point to note is that any contact with magnetic or electrical fields may cause faulty readings. Being an electrical instrument, interaction with such fields will provide false signals which will be recorded by the instrument as part of the readings. If this happens, the doctor might end up prescribing a wrong medication to the patient’s problem. The doctor might also think that the medication he or she had prescribed earlier is working or is not working when the opposite is actually true (Chung, 2013). Therefore, such external effects may force the doctor to make the wrong decision which in the long run might impact the patient’s health.
With the device taken care of, it’s now time to see how to take full advantage of its readings. The patient should engage in his or her normal day to day activities. Apart from those activities that may counter the instructions given earlier, the patient should go about his or her daily job without worrying about the Holter Monitor. This is crucial as the results will be of an ideal day. Some people may experience the heart problems while working and therefore this has to be recorded in order to get maximum advantage of the test.
Once everything is in place, it is important that the patient records an activity diary. This diary will show what the patient was doing at a particular time of the day. It also gives the doctor an idea of how the patient was feeling at a given point of the test period. On the Holter Monitor diary form, the patient should record every single change in his body reactions. Such reactions are; chest pains, shortness in breath, dizziness or uneven chest pains. All this will be taken into consideration while prescribing medications. Along with the reactions, the patient should record corresponding activities he or she was doing at that time. The doctor will compare the changes in the ECG recorded by the Holter Monitor with the activities and the corresponding effects on the body. This will give the medical practitioner an idea of what is causing the problems faced by the patient. All that the doctor will have to do next is take a few more tests before prescribing an appropriate medication for the problem.
In conclusion, great care should be taken when the Holter Monitor is already in place. If the instructions are not followed to the later, it might need to faulty results. These results are what the doctor is depending on in order to make the right decision. If tampered with, the patient will be the victim of this unfortunate situation.
Reference
Chung, E. K. (2013). Ambulatory electrocardiography: holter monitor electrocardiography . Springer Science & Business Media.
