In the earlier years of your life the only types of scale you may have seen would be bathroom scales of weighing machine at home. In school life, laboratory scales may have been important to you. In practical life you would see platform scales for lifting goods and placing it in shelves in some large super mart-cum-factory outlet near industrial area. You have even seen industrial type scales like forklift scales outside airport and ships for weighing before loading unloading cargo and containers. The professional life introduces you to scales used to measure weight of equipments or components for food processing, scientific labs, automotive industry, retail manufacturing, engineering and construction, agriculture, and so on. One very important scale category is medical scales.

As the name suggests medical scales are used for weighing finer medical objects in hospitals, medical institutions and companies manufacturing health care products and equipments. For their essential link to human life, their accuracy cannot be stressed enough. That is why the most sensitive ones provide accuracy of within 5 pounds or less. Knowing the weight of a patient on the spot and as his medical history can be the start of a life saving procedure esp. in operation cases, surgeries etc, special functions of medical scales ensure precision in results by evaluating for patient’s movements.

The standing bar scale readily found in any clinic are just the start of the type of the lost of medical scales. Understandably, many patients cannot stand or move enough for the time being, but need to be weighed which includes babies, expecting women, old age people, injured or fractured patients, or even those who are in intensive care unit i.e. bed ridden. Owing to these complexities, several options have been considered and developed into proper medical scales. Some patients may not even weigh accurately on regular scales because of peculiar weights e.g. infants need to be placed in a small tub-like scale for sensitive measurements crucial to their life process. On the other hand obese patients, needing to control weight or going for an intestinal (liposuction) operation, need special weighing scales that give reading for over 500 pounds. Heavy weight scales are also known as bariatric medical scales.

The reasons described above lead to extreme care in making an exceptionally engineered design that gives accurate measurements and stands up to medical standards as some scales need to be medically certified. Application of various technologies has been brought forth to specially weigh chemicals and compounds that go into the medical field of research. Extremely sensitive weighing devices are used to produce substances in definite amounts for a new medicine that can be life saving.

The above sophisticated medical scales help in medical research and development depending on potential accuracy. More practical ones are used as wheelchair and bed scales with a digital display to calculate weight of the patient minus the resting structure. Medical scales are usually intended to accommodate patients, e.g. a fold up chair for handicapped or injured patients. For this reason, medical scales need to have enhanced weight capacity and support features to guarantee patient safety.

Find More Medical Coding Articles