Facing a CT Scan? Think About Radiation

36 year old mommy,

Just like the previous post says, it hasn't yet been determined exactly how much radiation is needed to cause cancer. I realize that this statement sounds alarming. Look at it this way. How many minutes of exposure to UV rays from the sun is needed before one gets skin cancer? This hasn't been determined yet either but that doesn't stop us from going to the beach or the tanning booth. Here's another analogy, how many times does one have to cross the street before he will get hit by a car? The answer could be one time or a million times. If you need to cross the street to pick up your kid from school then you cross the street, right?

The amount of radiation that you say you've had in the time span that you report is not an unusual amount. If that's all you ever have for the rest of your life, then don't worry about it. If you have a medical problem and it is determined that an x-ray or a CT scan is needed to diagnose or help treat the problem you have to decide what is the more immediate risk to your life, the disease that you have now or the cancer that you might or might not get 20 years from now that might or might not have anything to do with the CT scan you recived in the past.

Rad of MI 11:43AM December 29, 2008

I really don't think people understand this whole dose-limit thing. 50 mSv is a radiology tech's YEARLY dose limit. Getting that over a 4-year period is very unlikely to kill you. Secondly, there is not a threshold dose, meaning they haven't even figured out how much radiation will cause cancer. It differs from person to person. Therefore, one person may get 3 exams done and have cancer; meanwhile, another patient may have 7 patient jackets buldging full of x-rays and not have cancer at all. As far as the man saying he should probably be glowing from all the radiation he has gotten--MYTH!! You don't walk out of an x-ray department radioactive unless you have had a nuclear medicine exam performed, and even then, the half-lives of those radioisotopes wear off usually by the end of the day. X-rays do NOT make you radioactive.

of CO 12:16PM November 21, 2008

Dear Steve,

I don't know who you are but you sound like a salesman for a company that is working with Mr. Schiel.

You forgot to consider the fact that the technology that you are refering to is not available to the average community hospital. This technology will also come at a very steep price because it is new and still yet to be proven. What hospital can afford this? Current technology is already expensive, as you have pointed out.

There is no fear of change among radiologists as you have suggested. If there were a fear of change of technology we wouldn't be using CT and MRI today or PET scanning today.

What insurance company will pay for this technology? If you think that the cost of uneccesary CT scans is contributing to the increase in health care what do you think the cost of this new technology will do?

There are a number of reasons that currently CT is used more often than MRI. CT is more readily available, it is cheaper than MRI and will not interfere with pacemakers and other implanted medical devices. Also, MRI has limitations with regards to imaging bowel. Current level of MRI requires patients to hold still for much longer times than CT. Current MRI technology has not proven to be the exam of all exams as was once thought when it was first introduced.

Rad of MI of MI 4:13PM October 23, 2008

Dear Matthew,

What if I told you that 98% of CT Scanning was unnecessary?

In the last decade Radiologists have increasingly defaulted detailed diagnostic studies to dangerous radiation based CT. Less and less has been demanded from MRI technology and subsequently the use and advancement of high-end MRI has lagged far behind what could be demanded from MRI capabilities.

Almost a decade ago, Lee Schiel pioneered acquisition strategies and 3D rendering of MRI data that far outpaced what the existing medical community has produced. And for almost a decade that same medical community has ignored the further advancement of this technology, even in the face of worldwide accolades in medical and research journals. The result: undiagnosed injuries, undiagnosed disease processes, unnecessary surgeries, and unnecessary catastrophic injuries.

If Lee Schiel’s technology was put into widespread use TODAY, the necessity of harmful radiation based CT imaging could diminish by 98%, MRI diagnostic accuracy could increase by an order of 2 -3 (4 -9 times better resolution and diagnostic ability) and the use of severely invasive exploratory surgery would all but become extinct.

We are looking at the face of a medical revolution…a diagnostic revolution, that will affect every aspect of health care today from better diagnostics, more affective (and appropriate) treatment protocols, rehabilitation and healing prior to catastrophic injury, and a substantial reduction in health care costs.

So why then is the medical community turning a blind eye to this new technology? Here are a couple of possibilities:

Financial – Radiologists and hospitals are so in debt from purchasing CT and MRI technology that they have to get the 10+years of use from their assets to breakeven. So they are not open to hearing about "new" technologies that make their investments obsolete.

Fear of change – reading and interpreting the new data sets in volume MRI requires looking at 3 dimensional images, like a video game, swimming through the anatomy from infinite oblique angles. A brilliant breakthrough, but requires a reeducation for radiologists and would require the radiologist to sift through significantly more data that could make them liable if they were to overlook critical data. Current radiology strategies look at a wall of 2 dimensional images with missing data between slices, a process that has been proven to miss life saving information, where the new 3-D imaging data is cubed with no gaps in-between, therefore offering larger amounts of information to sift through and find health abnormalities and injuries.

If you would like more to this story, please contact me and I will connect you with Lee Schiel.

Sincerely,

Steve Wilson

714-337-9429

Steve Wilson of CA 3:53PM August 18, 2008