Camillo Miola, The Oracle, 1880. J. Paul Getty Museum
Imaging machines, writes Dalrymple,
are to doctors what the Oracle at Delphi was to ancient Greeks.
The patient is stuck into one of them and
out comes the diagnosis with no possibility of error or appeal. Diagnoses that used to take weeks of elaborate examinations and painful investigations are made in less than half a day.
Who now remembers
In air encephalography, fresh air was substituted for cerebrospinal fluid, the better to show up ventricles
such ordeals as the air encephalogram, happily as redundant as the starting handle of a car?
However, older doctors
tend to lament that modern technology reduces the ability of their younger colleagues to perform physical examination of their patients or to exercise judgment, to the point that they are no longer aware of the necessity to exercise it: everything now is done by scan and algorithm.
Two other drawbacks to scanning technology are
- the cost
- the radiation to which it exposes patients, with possible ill-effects later in life. Medical scanning is now by far the most important cause of the population’s exposure to radiation
Dalrymple says it has been estimated that
up to a half of all scans performed are unnecessary.
MRI
PET
CAT
