Jeanette's Medical Adventures Part IV: The Gall Bladder Scan

[Sethomas]

Well, if it were an MRI they would have asked you a series of questions about what kinds of surgical history you've had and probably also if you had any kind of piercing on. There's always some concern that if you had a bone repair done before a certain year, I think when you'd be pretty young, there's a risk of ferromagnetic interference that could be pretty painful. I generally understand that in most cases it's not likely that you'd have metal fly out of/off your body with an MRI, but within the B-Field if you moved with any excessive iron it would generate a Lorentz force that would burn badly.

Kitsa's remark about the lead-shielded container would reflect that a PET injection would have very radioactive isotopes, and any contact with positrons is something that should be avoided. In fact, one of the biggest practical hindrances to PET scans is that they require very close proximity to a facility that can isolate them, often a large-scale cyclotron.

Just FYI, I've never formally studied medical imaging but it's my father's profession and I've encountered it in random situations during my schooling/life journey. I find it all sorts of fascinating because it employs all kinds of very pie-in-the-sky physics into real-life applications quite promptly after the physics is discovered in the laboratory. My resident head at Chicago was actually a young world authority on MRI, and it was fascinating to me when my dad would come up and visit to hear the two of them bullshit about the field.

MRI is something that I read about it on paper and think, "hey, that's great on paper, but the engineering aspects are WAAAY beyond us." But no, it's been readily available for decades. PET scans, however, strike me as bizarre because once you concede that anti-matter is a ready resource, it seems like an atrociously bad idea to use it with positive intent on a living organism. When I voiced this, my dad said, "well, if you're to the point where you need a PET scan, you've got worse things to worry about anyways."

A fun thing was that I always heard my father tell his patients, "don't worry about x-rays, the radiation level is equivalent to half an hour of television." It only recently clicked in that in terms of measurable levels this is probably totally true, but because of the nature of compton scattering it's complete bullshit to tell people that under the pretense that they are of comparable risk.