Avoiding Unnecessary CT Scans

[ahsan28]

Avoiding Unnecessary CT Scans

Doctor's View


CT is absolutely necessary with head trauma and acute abdominal conditions. Minutes can make a difference in these cases — if, say, there's bleeding around your brain and you can't get an MRI — and the speed of a CT scan makes it worth the risk. But in most other situations, it's wise to let the doctor convince you it's worth it, before consenting to the scan. Ask your doctor what decisions he or she plans to make with the information from the scan. What other tests could yield the same information? Would an MRI be better? Ask why the CT scan is necessary right now. Make a phone call, ask a specialist. 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.

But the reality is that in some cases, you'll need a CT scan. If so, just remember that for you to be there, breathing, you've already beaten the odds of sickness and death any number of times. And you'll probably beat the CT-cancer odds too. If the doctor's answer to your questions, however, is something like "Well, why not do a CT scan?" or "A CT scan would show it too" or "A CT scan would rule out something rare" my response would be "Why not skip the scan?" One in fifty cancers is a hard number to ignore.


Complete article here:-

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1698163,00.html

 

[جوري]

Good article but a bit misleading and I come to expect that from these types of magazines and newspapers. To be quite honest I am not sure why they hang around orphan studies from articles they fail to cite properly when writing such stories?
in fact here is a paragraph from the NEJM about this very matter..

Cancer Risks Associated with CT Scans

No large-scale epidemiologic studies of the cancer risks associated with CT scans have been reported; one such study is just beginning.32 Although the results of such studies will not be available for some years, it is possible to estimate the cancer risks associated with the radiation exposure from any given CT scan20 by estimating the organ doses involved and applying organ-specific cancer incidence or mortality data that were derived from studies of atomic-bomb survivors. As discussed above, the organ doses for a typical CT study involving two or three scans are in the range in which there is direct evidence of a statistically significant increase in the risk of cancer, and the corresponding CT-related risks can thus be directly assessed from epidemiologic data, without the need to extrapolate measured risks to lower doses.33

Volume 357:2277-2284 November 29, 2007 Number 22


This is one of the reasons I have posted the article about vaccines and autism. The media here is quite misleading and not just when it comes to politics, they never actually weigh in the pros or cons of what they write, before introducing an article which may cause an uproar and mass hysteria and seldom (if sued) do they face consequences to their non-professional opinions which often they pass off as science.

There is a protocol for who gets what and why, and people dedicate a life time to studying this. I don't think the medical community can keep tap on every layman with a column in some snazzy news paper, nor do they have time to sit there and rebut every Tom, Dick and Harry, but I'd caution people to question some of the things they read..
Doctors aren't infallible and it is prudent indeed to ask questions about your therapy and treatment. But I think the opinion of a medical professional who dedicated an x number of years of his life to the study of medicine from all facets should weight more heavily in the face of sensationalistic media and folks under pressure to come up with some story to fill a weekly spot!

 

[sabah]

Avoiding Unnecessary CT Scans

Doctor's View


CT is absolutely necessary with head trauma and acute abdominal conditions. Minutes can make a difference in these cases — if, say, there's bleeding around your brain and you can't get an MRI — and the speed of a CT scan makes it worth the risk. But in most other situations, it's wise to let the doctor convince you it's worth it, before consenting to the scan. Ask your doctor what decisions he or she plans to make with the information from the scan. What other tests could yield the same information? Would an MRI be better? Ask why the CT scan is necessary right now. Make a phone call, ask a specialist. 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.

But the reality is that in some cases, you'll need a CT scan. If so, just remember that for you to be there, breathing, you've already beaten the odds of sickness and death any number of times. And you'll probably beat the CT-cancer odds too. If the doctor's answer to your questions, however, is something like "Well, why not do a CT scan?" or "A CT scan would show it too" or "A CT scan would rule out something rare" my response would be "Why not skip the scan?" One in fifty cancers is a hard number to ignore.


Complete article here:-

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1698163,00.html

interesting stuff, im studying diagnotic radiology so im aware of the issue. jazakallah!