MRI

If you are holding a paper clip or a screw driver, when the MRI switch is
flipped on, the paper clip or screw driver could fly out of your hand and
through the air, towards the magnet, where the patient is usually laying down.
That paper clip or screwdriver then could become a flying missile, heading
right for the poor sucker who just wants to find out what is going on inside
his or her body. That is one way to really screw up an MRI.

Basically, an MRI machine uses the huge magnet to create electromagnetic waves
that create photons that are then turned into images, which are then read by
radiologists.

 Here is what Wikipedia says about the process: “In an MRI machine a radio
frequency transmitter is briefly turned on, producing an electromagnetic
field. The photons of this field have just the right energy, known
as the resonance frequency, to flip the spin of the aligned
protons. As the intensity
and duration of the field
increases, more aligned spins are affected. After the field is turned off, the
protons decay to the original spin-down state and the difference in energy
between the two states is released as a photon. It is these photons that
produce the electromagnetic signal that the scanner detects. The frequency at
which the protons resonate depends on the strength of the magnetic field. As a
result of conservation
of energy, this also dictates the frequency of the released photons.
The photons released when the field is removed have energy — and therefore a
frequency — due to the amount of energy the protons absorbed while the field
was active. It is this relationship between field-strength and frequency that
allows the use of nuclear magnetic resonance for imaging. Additional magnetic
fields are applied during the scan in order to make the magnetic field strength
depend on the position within the patient, providing a straightforward method
to control where the protons are excited by the radio photons.”

Malcolm Gladwell, the famous author and thinker, has noted the difference
between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle can be solved once you get all of the
pieces together. A mystery is sometimes insolvable even if all of the
information (or too much information) is staring you in the face.

The MRI can help doctors solve the puzzle of the human body by giving them more
pieces to look at. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will solve the mystery
of life, but the more information available to radiologists, the better.

Unless you are carrying a paper clip in with you, an MRI exam is safe. There is
no radiation that comes from it, and unless you have a pacemaker, the MRI has
no known long-lasting impact on your health, other than giving doctors a better
glimpse into what is going on within your body.

The other thing that can screw up an MRI is the president’s new healthcare law.

Under ObamaCare, the MRI is going to face some real challenges. Socialist
healthcare avoids the use of MRIs, because, well, they are pretty expensive.
They are pretty expensive to make because the technology is still evolving and
it is hard to get big magnets into small places. They are pretty expensive to
administer because it takes real expertise to run the machines and to examine
the results.

Radiologists are the ones who do the analyzing, and they are among the most
sued of doctors. Because the natural assumption that a radiologist has God-like
capabilities, when one misses a diagnosis (which happens on occasion),
malpractice lawyers pounce. Malpractice insurance is a significant cost
component to the eventual MRI bill.

President Obama’s healthcare plan does several things to make MRIs less
available to the average citizen. It puts a new tax on Medical devices, which
includes MRI machines. The new tax will put a perverse incentive for physicians
to move their imaging equipment from their offices to hospitals so they won’t
have to pay the tax.

The president’s plan also gives huge incentives to doctors to become general
practitioners, which is all fine and dandy, but that means that fewer doctors
will become radiologists. A radiologist shortage will have inflationary impact
on MRI usage and could make it harder for people to get one scheduled. In
Canada, waiting months to get an MRI is the rule, not the exception.

Because the president’s law did nothing to limit wasteful litigation against
these radiologists, it is still open season on them. That gives these doctors
even more of an incentive to do something else with their lives, like become
investment bankers.

The irony is that America leads the world when it comes to MRI manufacturing.
They are manufactured in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (among other places) by General
Electric. GE has the largest share of a competitive marketplace.

The next generation MRI, should we ever get there, would unlock even more of
the mysteries of the human body. It is an investment in technology that could
help find the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and help
doctors detect earlier cancers and heart disease.

But those kinds of advances don’t happen in a socialist healthcare system that
is stripped of all profit incentives. ObamaCare is bad for the MRI, which is
bad for the overall health of the American people.

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