Each year 12.7 million people are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million people die from disease. While this is a global problem, 13.7 million people in the United States alone have cancer. While there is not a cure for the disease, there are many different ways to help reduce it. One of those ways is nuclear medicine and nuclear imaging. Nuclear medicine is used to diagnose and treat many people that are living with cancer and other similar illnesses.
Nuclear medicine is used in all sorts of ways. It is mainly used in nuclear medicine imaging. Nuclear medicine has really helped the development of the medicine industry. It is safe, harmless and non-invasive diagnostic and treatment solutions. Nuclear medicine uses small amounts of radioactive
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It is considered prudent for public safety to assume that every exposure to ionizing radiation, no matter how small, carries some small risk of unwanted health effects. The reason for nuclear medicine is to help heal the unwanted diseases in someone’s body. CT scans are very helpful because they avoid invasive surgery that take hours and have risks with being under anesthesia (medicine & scientific research, n.d.). These scans help guide the treatment for many different diseases and injuries like car accidents, cancer, blood clots in the lungs and many more. According to the NCRP “Approximately 68 million CT scans were performed in the United States in 2006”(Medicine & scientific research, n.d.). Bone scans can detect the spread of cancer 6 to 18 months earlier than X-rays, kidney scans are much more sensitive than X-rays or ultrasounds in fully evaluating kidney function, and imaging with radioactive technetium-99 can help diagnose bone infections at the earliest possible stage (Medicine & scientific research, …show more content…
This actually helps shrink the tumors, rather than just diagnose them. It uses high-energy radiation to help cure the tumors and kill the cancer cells. Gamma rays and charged particles are types of radiation used for cancer treatment. Treatment can be delivered in two ways; a machine outside the body which is an external beam, or a radioactive material that is placed in the body near the cancer cells, which is called brachytherapy (radiation therapy for cancer, n.d.). Radiation therapy is different from chemotherapy, which exposes the whole body to cancer-fighting drugs. Radiation therapy, on the other hand, is local, its aimed at, and effects only the parts it needs to. The, “goal is to damage cancer cells without harming healthy cells” (How does radiation therapy work, 2015). Radiation therapy is preferred to chemotherapy because it tends to not harm the rest of the body, just the spot that is needed. Radiation therapy is a good option when someone is diagnosed with cancer, even with the
People also benefit from atomic research in the medical field. Many people are aware of the wide use of radiation and radioisotopes in medicine. Nuclear medicine mostly uses radioisotopes which emit gamma rays from within the body. Estimates show that about one out of every three hospital patients benefits in some way from the use of nuclear medicine. Just think, every time you have an X-ray taken you are benefiting from nuclear research. Without X-rays, doctors would have a far greater time trying to set a broken bone if they even knew it was broken! Another common medical procedure that involves atomic research is the Cat-Scan. During this procedure the patient is injected with a radioactive isotope which shows the flow of blood through the
Nuclear medicine technology has advantages and disadvantages just as any other career. Using nuclear medicine technology could diagnose a lot of harmful diseases. Also, it is more effective treatment for most categories of cancerous diseases and conditions in some medical institutions. This type of medicine technology helps physicians perform their responsibility of patients’ therapy easily; moreover, when a serious disease developed in the patient’s body, the x-rays of this medicine technology could scan the most sensitive part of the patient’s body.
Being a nuclear medicine technology means creating images of different area of the patient’s body and preparing radioactive drugs and administer them to patients undergoing the scans. The technologists
Nuclear energy is used today for energy supply and about 15% of the world’s energy comes from nuclear power plants some forms of medicine such as nuclear medicine rely
All kinds of ionizing radiation that used in health care centers in medical diagnosis and therapy processes, as well the radiation used in diagnostic radiology is the field of medicine that uses radiation to make an imaging exams and procedures to diagnose a patient. In another hand it’s used to treatment for many kind of disease especially to cure from cancer. In any form of medical care, diagnostic radiology plays a significant role in the diagnosis and treatment of disease or injury. The exams often use radiation, at many levels that have been determined and adjusted to be safe as possible, to create detailed anatomical images. (Bekas M, et al, 2016)
When talking about the topic of nuclear medicine, people tend to bicker about whether we should keep using nuclear in our medication or not. Many people are very happy and satisfied with its pros, benefits, and advantages, probably from bias, but many are also against it, again, probably from bias. We should continue to keep using nuclear medicine because it has overall been effective in treating our diseases. Without the technology to treat people today, there would be a lot of casualties. It has been successful in discovering abnormal lesions, certain dysfunctional organs, if the heart pumping blood sufficiently, if the brain is receiving an appropriate supply of blood, if the brain cells are functioning
Nuclear medicine is a branch of medical science, which uses small amounts of radioactive materials in order to diagnose and treat diseases. These diseases include cancers, heart diseases, and other irregularities in the body. The nuclear medicine is injected into the blood stream in order to identify potential diseases. There are over forty million nuclear medicine procedures preformed each year through radiation, or the energy in form of waves or high speed particles. The use of nuclear medicine allows the treatment of diseases without surgery. This form of treatment causes only minimal damage to the tissues surrounding cancerous cells.
Medicine has developed into an astonishing work of pure art over the years. From an old village healer crushing the simplest herbs in ancient times, to large machines administering chemical formulas to patients today. The newest addition to this artwork is Nuclear Medicine. Nuclear Medicine is a medicine that deals with the use of radioactive substances entering the body to attach/ attack cells. Whether it be to diagnose, test, or to treat, this nuclear technology has driven the medical and chemistry world into the future.
There are several treatment options in the fight against cancer (surgery, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, stem cell transplant and bone marrow and cord blood transplants etc.) The two most commonly used treatments are chemotherapy that uses drugs to destroy cancer cells, and radiation therapy that uses high-energy radiation to kill cancer cells by damaging their DNA. Aside from killing cancer cells treatment’s cause many more problems for the patient, including treatment induced diseases and death.
I am interested in entering the field of Nuclear Medicine Technology because of my father’s medical history. My father was diagnosed in Spring of 2017 with Stage IIB Melanoma. He was accepted into a clinical trial at Emory in Atlanta, GA to hopefully “cure” him. During his clinical trial, he has routine scans that use nuclear medicine technology to be able to see his melanoma sites and the rest of his body at a higher degree then past medical advances would allow. I am one of those patient family members that like to know everything about their family members treatments, so I have asked many questions about the nuclear medicine aspect of his care plan and find it fascinating.
Also, x rays are capable of detecting many other issues such as cancerous masses or pneumonia as well as even dental problems all of which, again, can and have saved many lives [4]. For comparison, 400 million people are subject to x rays annually, which save substantially more lives than those of which were killed in japan [5]. Radiation can also be applied, not only to see but also to save patients in that it can be used, since it damages tissues, to kill things like tumors and other potential dangerous or life threatening masses within your body. Ironically enough it kills what it causes and for purpose of numbers, women with breast cancer had a survival rate of 25.1% in 1944 that more than tripled to 76.5% in the years 1995-2004 [6]. Also, now, 67% of women receive radiation treatment after having been diagnosed and the number is increasing [6]. But, beyond the medical field there are also economical advances that are largely caused by the use of nuclear power. These include the implementation of nuclear power plants that provide the cleanest and quickest way of generating electricity [7]. Also, to again throw numbers into the equation, fossil fuels are being consumed faster than they can be produced and the fuel for nuclear reactors, Uranium-235, is only worth 20%,
What first comes to mind when I read nuclear medicine as one specialty medical career field online was x-rays, and bones. I didn’t realize until reading more about the career field that nuclear medicine gives a person the “ability to work with every system of the human body – skeletal, circulatory, endocrine and pulmonary” (Shifko, 2010). Nuclear medicine is a medical specialty involving the application of radioactive substances that diagnose and treat diseases. The origins of this medical idea go back as far as the mid-1920’s.
The medical field also benefits from nuclear energy. Nuclear medicine is a field of medicine in which radioactive materials are used to diagnose and treat medical disorders
What I learned from our guest speaker Alan, which chose nuclear medicine as is modality, the first day you begin in nuclear medicine is by using gamma cameras (QC), to perform a radioactive trace. Before a procedure is perform on a patient, a procedure is done on the imaging unit called cobalt disk or technesium. This procedure would flush the camera source and tell you if your photomultipliers tubes are working properly for an exam. Radioisotopes are used in nuclear medicine by injecting an MVP known as phosphate into the body with the help of a syringe. In the case of a bone scan, this radioactive material called phosphate is introduced into the body and absorbed by the bones, preparing this procedure for a bone scan after three hours. Such
In nuclear medicine diagnosing techniques, a very small amount of radioactive material is introduced into the body. Because medical isotopes are attracted to specific organs, bones or tissues, the emissions they produce can provide crucial information about a particular type of cancer or disease. Information gathered during a nuclear medicine technique is more comprehensive than other imaging procedures because it describes organ function, not just structure. The result is that many diseases and cancers can be diagnosed much earlier.