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Pediatric throat exam

Some tips and tricks for examining children’s throats:

1. Don’t do it until after you’ve gotten your lung, heart, and abdomen exam – once you make them cry, it’s game over
2. A helpful position for young children is to sit on the parent’s lap facing the parent, legs straddling the parent. Then, have the parent lean the child back so he/she is laying supine on the parent’s knees with the head hanging back (the dentist chair view)
3. Older children can be asked to pant like a dog, scream, or sing “ah ah ah ah ah” opera-style
4. Sometimes if you do the ear exam first, the child will yell and then you can see the throat