The post-it reads “Sometimes I think that a patient thinks that medical imaging is like a window into their body. It is, but it is frosted over.”
Patients are always keen to look at their films. They don’t know what they are looking at and want us to interpret for them, but they are excited.
Medical imaging- CT scan, mammography, MRI, even x-ray, can be confusing for an untrained eye to look at them and diagnose themselves. Doctors train for years and years to be able to interpret faint images that result from these tests. To tell the good, crisp scan, which they aren’t, from the blurry blob.
Each of the medical imaging type is used in the diagnosis of different things. A CT of your abdomen when you have belly pain will tell the doctor different things than an ultrasound of your abdomen.
An MRI is more specific but prohibitively expensive, which is why the cheaper tests are done first.
There is an art to medical imaging reading that, again, takes years to learn.
And even then the picture can be fuzzy.
I was going to write kind of like tea leaves and augury (mucking about in entrails) to tell the future but medical imaging is hard science, not telling the future.
I will absolutely bring up your pictures, but unless there is a helpful arrow drawn on by the radiologist, I have very limited experience to draw upon.
I am better with x-rays of bone.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 