I want to give you some quick tips that you want to keep in mind whenever you're doing an abdominal assessment so the first thing what you want to do is you want to inspect that abdomen but then you want to auscultate normally we would do auscultation last but here we don't want to go poking and prodding on the patient through percussion and palpation because we may throw off our assessment then whenever you go to auscultate you want to start in a specific place the right lower quadrant and the reason for this is because this is normally where you should hear bowel sounds because the ileocecal valve is there which connects the small and the large intestine then you are going to go clockwise to all the other quadrants and listen so you should hear about five to Thirty bowel sounds per minute if you hear anything less than that that's hypoactive if you hear anything more than that that's hyperactive and if you don't hear anything after five full minutes it's considered absent and then lastly whenever you go to listen for those breweries you want to use the bell of your stethoscope because this is the best part of your stethoscope that allows you to hear those low pitch noises