“Surprise, surprise, surprise!” drawled an awestruck Gomer Pyle, taken off guard by the obvious way more than he should have been. Maybe that’s why this hound-dog–looking actor came to mind as I read a study indicating that hospital deaths drop when more imaging exams are done. More »
A storm of public anger is brewing. The first signs are the gathering winds of dissent within the medical community against decades of sometimes shrill advocacy for breast and prostate cancer screening, winds that could easily blow up an indignant response from the American public. More »
I grew up believing that you get what you pay for. Look for sales, not knockoffs. Buy inexpensive, not cheap. Those were my shopping tenets, handed down by parents who lived through the Great Depression. After many years of believing this, I’m sorry to say the tenets may not actually hold, at least... More »
If current life expectancy trends continue, more than half of the babies born in rich nations today will live 100 years. Reaching the century mark is the natural extension of the huge increases in life expectancy—30-plus years—seen in most developed countries over the 20th century. Death... More »
It should come as no surprise that the nuclear medicine community is struggling to keep up with the number of prescribed heart and bone exams. Technetium is typically used in the U.S. for more than 16 million nuclear medicine tests each year—but not this year. A survey by the SNM found that three... More »
Using logic that could just as easily be applied when considering a toddler, the federal government damned proton therapy on Sept. 14 with a report that brands the cancer treatment as lacking evidence of effectiveness and safety. More »
It’s the kind of research that radiology needs: a study performed at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine that documents enormous cost savings from the use of an image-guided procedure. More »
Sometimes it’s just better not to know. One of those times may be when you feel perfectly fine, but your brain scan comes back with something that looks bad. The problem: how do you know it’s nothing to worry about? More »
The argument that diagnostic technologies make a difference in clinical outcomes is like the one that eyesight is helpful when crossing the street. If you don’t see danger coming, whether it is a disease or car, it’s hard to avoid it. Most in radiology would agree that this certainly makes sense for... More »
Ask this question of someone in the U.S. radiology community and I’m willing to bet the answer will be spoken a bit louder than the question was asked. The premise is insulting—although apparently not to radiologists in Norway, or so I have been led to believe. More »
