One of the enduring lessons I learned in college was this one, from an advertising course I took as a sophomore. Who is most likely to read an ad for a new car? You might think it would be people who are in the market for a new car. It's not. The person most likely to read an ad is the person who just bought a new car. They want to reaffirm their decision, and if they blew it, for some reason, they want to punish themselves for it. So, having had a CT scan over the weekend, when I saw this article on Avoiding Unnecessary CT Scans, I couldn't resist.
It had some pretty scary stuff in it:
there's a good chance that after ordering up that plain film, the emergency doctor will send you down the hall for a second test — one that exposes you to many hundreds of times the radiation of a plain film: a CT scan. The radiation from a CT scan, or computed tomography, actually has been shown to cause cancer — quite a bit of it.
Fortunately for me, I don't need to beat myself up over the procedure exposing me to cancer risks.
CT is absolutely necessary with head trauma and acute abdominal conditions. ... Ask how confident the doctor feels about your diagnosis without the scan. If a good surgeon really thought I had appendicitis, I'd go straight to the OR — not to the scanner.
My doctors said that some of my symptoms (most notably, abdominal pain that was sensitive to the touch on the right side) were consistent with appendicitis, but several others were inconsistent. The scan was necessary, they said, to make sure that we risked neither letting my appendix burst, possibly killing me, nor putting me through a fairly substantial surgery unnecessarily. At the conclusion of my scan, the technician told me the specialist would review my films and have a conclusion within 30 minutes or less. As it turned out, it was less than five minutes later than the doctor rolled in with the bad news that I was headed for the OR.
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