feotal dopplers

A few questions
Has anyone brought one of these? Are they any good and roughly how much? is $75 an ok price?
After mw appt today im thinking of buying one was so amazing listening to the wee one! also hubby missed out would be nice for him to hear too

Where did you get your one from Aprilfools?

We got (probably a more budget one) heaps cheaper off Trademe too...a bit of a godsend when I hadn't felt bubs for a while but didn't want to bug the midwife.

I've just bought one of trademe this evening - $75 so probably the one you were looking at shannon (angel sounds?) Hopefully it doesn't take too long to get here

I never thought I'd get something like that but I'm so worried that baby is not ok (for no reason, just paranoid) and don't want to bother the midwife for no reason and dh was sick of hearing me wondering out loud if the baby is ok (and I want to feel it move and blah blah blah) that we decided why not just buy it. Here's hoping it's easy to find the heartbeat, otherwise it'll stress me out even more no doubt.

I had one with the gremlins and again with Chiara, call it paranoia but hey, pregnancy after loss entitles a little paranoia!

I paid way more for mine, about $180,but it's a clinical grade one the same as the midwives use. Am about to sell it on TM.

Hi I got the Angel Sounds one of trade me for $75. It was great. Esp as I had lots of bleeding right through the 1st trimester and part of the 2nd so needed the peace of mind. It was also nice to come home from work and relax on the couch listening to bubs wriggle around. You don't just need to use the headphones. It comes with an extra wire that you can plug into your computer or stereo (if got the right connections) and everyone can listen.

Ummm, I don't know, I just looked it up and I paid $175 for it. I also have two 1/2 full bottles of the ultrasound gel which were $14 each. Maybe $100 for the lot? If anyone is keen PM me, otherwise I'll chuck it on TM.

And you are getting your information from where?

As far as I was able to ascertain from looking into it, it hasn't been proven to be unsafe and there is no scientific research to back up what you're saying.

My midwife doesn't have a problem with it either.

I my doppler - I don't use it often and when I do, only for a minute or two, just to hear the heartbeat.

It was really good to get, especially after m/c my first, and the one I got was the Angel Sounds off trademe.

It was also cool for DH to be able to hear the heartbeat and feel a lot more involved in the pregnancy.

shannon - It does come with a warning of only using for 1-2 mins up to 3 times a day, but once I started to feel baby move, I never use it as much. (and I only probably used it every couple of days for a minute per day at the start before I felt movements)

AmmaS wrote: Are you people crazy. Doppler should only be used by the appropriate health care professional to monitor fetal well being. Too much ultrasound has not been demonstrated to be safe. The Sonic aids used by midwives are a continuous wave (constant dose for the duration) this dose is far higher than that of ultrasound imaging.

That's a bit random! And a bit incorrect! A sonic aid/hand held doppler is a much lower exposure to u/s than u/s imaging, for one thing some u/s scan's can take more than an hour, it takes only a few minutes to find the heart beat with a doppler.

Ultrasound has been used in pregnancy for many years with no ill effect, for a while it was thought that it may cause smaller/low birthweight babies but this was later disproven, the data was biased as pregnancies in which there was high use of u/s tend to be high risk pregnancies to start with which already have a higher risk of producing a smaller baby.

The doppler flows that are used to measure the blood supply between the placenta and the baby via the umbilical cord are considered to be the most invasive u/s procedure but again the time spent doing them is so low, only a few minutes, that the effects on baby are nil.

I had more than 17 scans in total with the gremlins, most of which included doppler flows to rule out TTTS, not to mention using a hand held doppler regularly from 12 weeks until delivery, and the CTG monitoring I had to have done every 2 days for the last 4 weeks which also uses u/s technology. I would far rather expose my baby/ies to these small amounts of ultrasound to ensure their safety and wellbeing than not utilise available technology and risk missing a potentially serious problem. For example, my Sienna has a congenital renal problem which, had it not been picked up antenatally, could have led to serious and lifelong problems, but coz it was picked up at 33 weeks was able to be treated with surgery and ongoing medication and hasn't presented any problems.