Dei'ah veDibur - Information & Insight
  

A Window into the Chareidi World

19 Shevat 5760 - January 26, 2000 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
NEWS

OPINION
& COMMENT

HOME
& FAMILY

IN-DEPTH
FEATURES

VAAD HORABBONIM HAOLAMI LEINYONEI GIYUR

TOPICS IN THE NEWS

HOMEPAGE

 

Sponsored by
Shema Yisrael Torah Network
Shema Yisrael Torah Network

Produced and housed by
Jencom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home and Family
Your Medical Questions Answered!
by Joseph B. Leibman, MD

Diplomate, Board Certification of Emergency Medicine

Chairman, Department of Emergency Medicine Ma'ayenei Hayeshua Hospital

MUGA, CT, MRI, Flor, Echo, Thallium, Sestamibi, VQ,CXR, Angio. Most people are not familiar with the above words and abbreviations, but there are all tests that are done with our new technology in the field of radiology.

X-rays were discovered in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm Roentgen. He discovered that, depending on the density of the material, pictures taken of things with a form of radiation produced different figures on photographic paper. In a person, air is deep black, fluid and tissue are white, and bone is deep white. This helps us not only find fractures of bones, but tells us about obstructions in abdomens, pneumonias and heart failure in the chest and masses on mammography.

One X-ray is very safe. One of my favorite stories is about a child who swallowed the nose of his teddy bear. In the emergency room, they brought his sister's bear (it was the same type), X-rayed its nose and then the little boy. In the end they found that bear's noses do show up on X-rays, but the boy had not swallowed it.

X-rays do not pick up everything. Gall bladder stones for example often don't show up on X-rays. Babies in their mothers wombs may be damaged by X-rays. Some parts of the body are hard to reach with X-rays, such as the prostate and the female organs. X-rays don't tell us anything about blood flow and clots.

Enter ultrasound. This works like a bat's natural equipment -- it bounces sound waves off an object and then recovers them. Based again on the density of the object, the sound waves are bounced back at different frequencies. Sound waves are everywhere, so the safety of ultrasound is unquestioned. It is cheap and available.

However, the detail one gets with ultrasound isn't always the greatest. I don't know who it was, but someone came up with the idea of taking many X-rays of the same body part from different angles, and then reconstructing the images with a computer. The detail was remarkable. This was the birth of CT scanning. It has revolutionized the diagnosis of stroke and trauma, and evaluates the abdomen and chest as well as the head in ways normal X-rays can't even come close to. Naturally the load of radiation is high, but this test is the most available and gives the most information.

MRI is the newest modality. It doesn't even work on radiation but rather magnetism. The detail is even better than CT, but it is very expensive. With the exception of spinal cord disorders, other tests should be done first. Be careful! Your magnetic strip cards, such as credit cards, can be affected in an MRI building.

Nuclear medicine is a field where a radioactive chemical is injected into the blood stream, and a Geiger counter is waved over the body to see where the radiation is picked up in the body. It is safer than it sounds. These chemicals have very short lives in the body and they quickly become non radioactive. They mainly help in heart scans, such as stress tests, and in bone and lung scans.

The technology is amazing, and takes a lot of guesswork out of medicine. Still, going for these specialized exams can be time consuming, occasionally claustrophobic and expensive. Nevertheless they are for the most part safe and can make a difference. Write me in care of the Yated.

 

All material on this site is copyrighted and its use is restricted.
Click here for conditions of use.