Tony Wald understands just how meaningful a stethoscope can be. As the service department supervisor of the 3M Health Care Service Center, he’s seen it all. “We’ve received stethoscopes that have been taped together, some that have been chewed up by the family pet or been in house fires,” says Tony.

He and his team offer a repair service to help medical professionals mend their broken friends in a matter of days. “It’s a very personal product. When customers send it in, they don’t want to be without it even for a day.”

Experts at the 3M Health Care Service Center in Oakdale, Minnesota, offer repair services for their 3M Littmann mechanical stethoscopes, as they have for the past 40 years. “We service around 12,000 stethoscopes a year, and we get about 50-75 repairs a day,” Tony says.

Anna learned about this service through a friend after she began noticing a change in her trusty implement. “I found that I couldn’t hear things that were already difficult to hear, like faint lung sounds, the way I could before,” she says. Anna took it in for a checkup and as it turns out, it was just a matter of repairing its tubing. Click here to learn about warranties and repair options.